Theme development

I have a view that needs to display a node's thumbnail image with its title and some text displayed to the right. Here is what I'm trying for (check out the "More Top Stories" block) :

Here is what my view presents (notice the node title and summary appear at the bottom right of the image. The goal is for that text to begin at the top right of the image.):

What css is needed to accomplish this goal? Thanks.

I'm using the following code in template.php:

function sdr_form_system_site_information_settings_alter(&$form, &$form_state)	{
	$form['phone_number'] = array(
		'#type' => 'textfield',
		'#title' => t('Phone Number'),
		'#description' => t('Appears in the website footer'),
		'#default_value' => variable_get('phone_number', ''),
	);
}

(sdr is the theme name)

I'm creating a View of blog posts, and attempting to have their titles link to an offsite blog, with a url formatted in this way: [url]/year/month/title-of-blog-post. I created separate fields for post date and title, which I've excluded from display so I would have them available as tokens, but for some reason the punctuation isn't being stripped from the title field, so I end up with something like [url]/2015/09/Nature,-Art-and-the-City.

This is a newbie question, but one I can't seem to understand. Hopefully I can make myself understood!

how can i create a multi row carousel like the example in the url below: MultiCarousel - Title+description+image - vertical- multi row but instead of being vertical like the link shows i would like it to be horizontal. I have already created my content type with its fields all i need is help in displaying it just as in the url how can i achieve this?

Hello,

I really like the design of this website and I would like to take some inspiration from that and put it into my website.

Is there any similar looking themes that are available on drupal already? If i were to build one from scratch, what might be a good point to start? My website is running on bootstrap based theme at the moment. Can i build a similar one from bootstrap? Or are there better base themes that I should try, that would make building such tile based themes easy?