How to get two column layout and announcements blocks across the top?

[featheredtoast (Jeff Wong)]

Two column layouts is the category view, using the desktop category page style setting set to “Categories and Latest Topics”.

As for the featured topics, something similar to this may be what you’re looking for:

How to add a featured topic list to your Discourse homepage

In this #howto we’ll add a topic list populated by a tag or a category on top of your homepage’s main topic list, like this: [04%20PM] All of the code below can be added to the </head> (head_tag.html) section of your theme. This first part checks which page we’re on, then sets up our topics. For the purpose of this how-to we’re pulling topics tagged featured. If you want to pull topics from another tag or a category you need to change the /tags/featured.json url in here. <script type="text/…