There is a great deal of white space between my text and some of my graphics even though when I am in the edit mode, I am placeing things one after another. Is there a way to elimiate some of the white space.

Two things here:

1) The code that made up your glitter text third party plugin seemed to have become separated on the page, and I believe this was causing the extra white space. Somehow the browser was still splicing the code back together and your plugin was actually displaying, but I'd like to ask you to go back out and grab the original third party plugin code and pop it back in there at the top of your page so it's all together in one place. I think this will solve the spacing issue.

2) Your Announcement glitter graphic is too wide for the space you're attempting to put it, which will be particularly bad for Firefox users (it will shove all of your home page content to the very bottom of your page). When you create that graphic you should not make it any larger than 350 pixels wide. Anything wider than that will cause various problems based on the browser the viewer is using.