[support] Custom Home Page

[Fred Jones]

I have a new D7 site with a unique home page--I am migrating the
entire site from static HTML. There is a top part which will be a
View, and then four columns below. One of those is a View, but the
other three aren't. They are static content but the client of course
wants to be able to edit them easily. One has

Title, Text, Image, Video

and the other two have

Title, Text, Image, Link

So between them there's only 5 unique fields really. The layout is
specialized, so if they can just edit those, I can do the rest. So I
have a few questions:

1. My guess is that using Panels is overkill and I could just custom
code a display for the home page. They have no plans to adjust
anything beyond the content. Makes sense?

2. To let them edit the content I could either make a special content
type and then have a field to assign one to column 1,2,3, but then
maybe they will create two nodes for col 1. So I suppose I could setup
a Rule that if they create a node and assign to a column that already
has a node, then the rule will unset the existing node of that column.
Then they could keep the old ones around. Or I could unpublish the
existing node.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks.