Jay,
Imho the best solution to this is to use the Custom Layouts plugin and add your own custom widgets. The former takes care of most of the heavy layout lifting and neatly isolates you from the main Discourse elements and protects you from core upgrades to a large extent.
Given you don’t appear to have the personal expertise, unless you are willing to put in the extensive time it would take to learn, you should probably consider hiring a developer to help build your widgets. Put an ad with mockups in Marketplace