Just expanding on David's suggestion:
You can define a region with four sub-regions. The sub-regions would narrow enough so that four of them fit into your region, and when floating them left, you'll have the column look you are looking for.
You then can populate the "columns" as David suggested with a node or a view. The node could then be put into that region with the option of only appearing on the front page. I did this recently for http://trumantechnologies.com (that's a zen sub-theme).

Ursula

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Metzler, David <metzlerd@evergreen.edu> wrote:
Another idea would be to build the 4 column spots into the theme as
regions that render gracefully if not present..  Then use views to
create block(s) that drive each of the pieces of content into the
regions based on your same concept of a field specifying the columns.
In this way you could build other pages with similar layouts, and it
might be more flexible over time, as you could build similar structures
on different pages.

Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On
Behalf Of Fred Jones
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 8:32 AM
To: support@drupal.org
Subject: [support] Custom Home Page

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.
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