Hi www.mariescholz.com is my website
I am wondering first of all if there is a way to make the feature photos for posts bigger? As you can see they are small and centered and it looks bad.
Second is there a way to make the recent posts section look more like the portfolio section with thumbnails side by side?
You can try achieving that by using any of the following plugins instead of using Shapely recent posts widget or you have to develop custom code to achieve this.