The way I got it to work is I went to channels.php on my site and did "view source".

I then copied and pasted the code for the section that shows the channels that I wanted on the front page.

I then pasted that code and removed the "how many and what not"parts leaving just the picture and the description parts into index.tpl where I wanted it to appear and it worked fine. You can currently view this at vshare-mods.com which is my "play with this script till it breaks and gets really ugly and screwed up" site.

I used the code for only the first 4 channels since this was just an example thing. You can put whatever channels or "categories" you want to show in there.