Wordpress themes for niche sites

Yeah, that kind of thing. But I am thinking of only showing an excerpt of the "main" article, like a "featured page" (perhaps instead of the slider - I'd rather it was static, and not JavaScript-based). It doesn't make any sense from the conventional micro-niche point of view because people tend to rely on the whole homepage being dominated by the full article, whereas I only want to show maybe 1 paragraph or 100 words or something, and the rest of the homepage taken up with other widget positions. I think once your site gets some authority you can start to play with the homepage like this.

I also notice you have these kind of "Text box" widgets on a lot of the Clickbump themes - do they show excerpts of particular posts or pages, or are they a static text widget that you have to populate yourself? I mean, it shouldn't really matter if they are full-on registered widget positions, you should be able to put what you want in there, right?

I guess I am looking at a homepage that is basically one-column template, where, if you imagine it as being, say a 4 x 4 grid of widget positions, might look something like this:

AAAB
CCDD
EFGH

Where A is three-quarters width and would typically house a "featured page" excerpt ("blue widgets"), B might be an ad position or something, C and D could be other featured pages ("big blue widgets", "small blue widgets") and EFGH might be featured post categories, or similar.

That's just an example, I hadn't thought that out in detail, but basically, the whole thing would be more "busy" and authoritative.

I mean, I guess this can be coded up with your framework - heck, I can do this myself with an afternoon's work with any theme I like, but I was hoping there was something readily available out there.

Just so we don't get too OT - I wonder if anyone has experience with building their niche sites out this way? I am willing to risk hosing an authority site of mine to see - I bet my bottom dollar it doesn't affect rankings...