Dear Becky,
first of all, thank you for the purchase!
To determine the root of the sidebar problem, I’ll need to take a look at the admin side – could you please ask Joseph to send me the website’s admin credentials to [email protected] (no disclosure guaranteed). But before that, please check if there are any widgets assigned to the custom sidebars you’ve created – you can do that by visiting the “Appearance -> Widgets” menu.
Regarding the second question – in case you wish to display images in the sidebar, you can use one of the many third-party widgets, e.g. this one. WordPress does not have a “native” widget for that, unfortunately, but you can also insert an image into the simple text widget, by using the HTML image tag (surely Joseph knows how to do it ;)
Sincerely,
Andrew | Satori Studio