Best way to make a hub page with blocks of dynamic content in wordpress?

New to wordpress- have developed in Drupal for the last 5 yrs. Been reading docs – just trying to get opinions on people more seasoned to save me from going the wrong direction.

Issue: Making a hub page for a site – where it will pull and display teaser or summary like information from the other parts of the site and an image that represents that part of the site.

Need:
1. 2 blocks or widget areas within the content area over taking the content area or below it.
2. I need to keep the footer – with the site map the way it is – so can not use them for this.
3. The blocks need to be 50% width floating next to each other.
4. Need one block to be blog block pulling 3 titles or 1 title of a blog post with an featured image.
5. Other would be an events block with the featured events.

I have an image showing what I need.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1UtLF9ZEXTiaW9HZWJidUZEUFE/edit?usp=sharing

Questions? Does the answer reside in?

1. Creating widgetized areas? And placing new widgets in the content area of a page template?
2. Creating a template and hardcoding the design and content directly in the template
3. If so would I – are you able to pull pieces/parts of a post or a page – like the tittle; featured image; and excerpt – in order to create a user experience like i show?
4. Can I limit the content to just certain categories or taxonomy? Such as for the blog block – would want only the main user’s blog recent or featured blog post to diplayed in there.

Any help or pointing in the right direction would help. Thank you.

Jamie