Thank you for your response and apologise for my late reply.

So, I come back with my questions:

1. For the home page and the manually selected posts – please note these will not be regular posts from the blog page. These posts I want to add on the home page are custom posts types generated by geodirectory plugin. I have 2 custom posts types: places and events. I would like to have a section on the homepage where to add 3 or 4 recommendations from these custom posts types. What elements can I use from the advanced layout editor?

2. For the blog page: I have several subcategories. On the main blog page and also on the subcategory pages, I want to include a slide-show with some posts, and below the slide-show, I would like to have the blog posts arranged in the grid layout.
If I edit the blog page using the layour editor by adding a slide-show and the grid layout posts below, this is works only for the main blog page, but not for the subpages as well (on the subpages, the posts are showed in full, one after another, instead of slide-show+grid layout).

3. How can I lower the size of the footer?

Thank you!