Wordpress website - creative and fun theme and template

I'm finally shifting my old HTML site to a wordpress platform and I need some technical expertise and help. Here's the story. The old site has become cluttered and clunky. so the new site needs to be organized--everything easy to find and access. the old site has dead and incongruous links. It's not complete. The new site needs to be flowing and smooth, all pages connecting properly. the old site has a clunky feel to it, the pages are overloaded with content that becomes really overwhelming with the wordpress format. There is a limited HTML calendar listing that is also clunky. The new site needs to have a simple yet easy to inform calendar system to list upcoming dates for events. A blog, membership sign up. Access to free ebooks and materials for signing up, link to newsletter and audio recordings, and perhaps even a shopping cart. I suspect a two or three column setup will be good. I want to be sure everything is accessible, yet have enough space on the page so that it's not cluttered. I know a bit about wordpress and how easy it is to work with. On the good side, I already have wordpress installed and a standard template, but I'm not stuck with it. In fact, I have a specific graphic I would like inserted into the header. I also appeal to your experience and expertise as far as the best way to layout the menu bar and pages. I'm certainly capable of doing standard editing, but it's the technical stuff that I need help with. The first step is to get the template/home page established and up and running. I don't suspect that it will be a challenging or time consuming job for someone with good web building skills. I've attached an example of the basic idea, and I'm open to your suggestions. After that, we can explore about refining and expanding, but I've put this off too long and there are many projects that are waiting for this. Including some new pages that haven't even been built yet (about 5-7). But the main job now is to get the main page up and running so I can shift all the exiting pages over and begin functioning through the new site.