How to Customize Front Page

My website is https://pembrokeinstruments.com

I would like to customize further as follows:
1) I would like to reduce the size of the slider a lot so it does not dominate the page so much. I would like equal weight with the featured images (I have 8)

2) I would like to uniformly compress and center the area defined by
(slider + featured images) so I could add custom images and text on both the left and right side of the page. Maybe this can come through setting up widget areas but I don’t want this to push the content that is there further down the page. I try and design the webpages so down scrolling is minimized.

I have feature pages unlimited and I am OK with adding snippets to the Child Theme I have set up.