Drupal Views: Create 3-Column Home Page with Taxonomy Terms I am looking to create a 3-column home page design for my site that segregates 3 different items of a given taxonomy type (News, Training Alerts, and Advisories) into 3 separate columns. Each column shows not only the taxonomy term, but pulls the content associated with it (e.g. a teaser view of each item marked 'News'). 

I am not very familiar with Drupal themes, but currently I have been able to accomplish everything I've wanted with my site using the Bartik theme. Are there any ways I can accomplish this using Views and without having to change much about the Bartik theme? Or alternatively, is there a way to just create a table with PHP code that pulls the content associated with each taxonomy type into each column of a 3-column table?
You can do that easily with your bartik theme.
You can use Panels and page manager with views.

It's not easy to use but it's worth it. There is a great screencast series in nodeone.se.

To be short:


In views: you'll make a content pane (not a block or page)
With panel you can retrieve all the information from this pane and choose your layout and where you want to put all your fields inside it.
In your case you can make 3 content pane, each one with a specific taxonomy. After that you'll choose in which columns you'll want to put them.