1) You can set your home page (store settings ) to whatever you like.  We created a separate landing page, outside of the cart itself, and have used that as the home page.  Whatever page you use, just think that the user will want to have the choice (visible) to see what you have in the cart - so categories would work also.   Try it out.  You can also edit the default page to suit your needs through the store settings.

2)

Third column.

You should be able to create a third column/ set widths, by modifying the CSS that is used.
One thing to observe, from, experience is that if you set the column width's too wide you'll mess up the layout so you have to re-adjust the left column width in the CSS.  

When I set up our first site, we didn't use the correct CSS and Header/Footer layout - but one of the stylesheets (pertaining to the Header and Footer) allows for a third column. 

Sounds a little confusing at first but you can see there are (at least for us) two different layouts HeaderFooter.  One says Header08 or something like that.  Don't use that one, as it will provide only a twol column layout.   If this doesn't make sense send me an email. 

We were caught in a mid-upgrade so our file structure for the cart is a little wonky, but that is the key above to setting three columns and establishing the widths of the columns.

I hope this is a couple of easy questions, I've search around and can't seem to find a quick answer.  Here are my questions:  I've set my home page (in store settings) to the "viewcategories.asp" page.  Is this ok to do?  Should I be using a redirect or is this essentially what the setting of the home page does.

 

Secondly.  is there an easy way to set the web site width?  I'd like the default web page width to be a little wider.  Possibly using a 3rd columns, is this easy to do?

 

Thanks for the info!

John