The two sites you reference are definitely customized. Those are both great examples of how our themes can be customized to fit your needs.
You would definitely want to create a child theme for any customization. You would then need to modify the index file to get this on the home page
Here's a document (
http://docs.appthemes.com/tutorials/...tarted-styling ) that will get you started with creating child themes for Vantage. If you needed help with modifications, you could try our partners page (
http://www.appthemes.com/partners ).