Communities Pages - how 2 limit LHS content?

Question

I need to remove the "Create New" and "Quick create" (and a few other links) from the LHS on Contacts and Ideas tab within our new Communities site.

All of those options are fine within the internal SFDC production stance but they represent a serious security issue for our data within a Community instance.

I have been told that the only way to do this is via rebuilding a SF sites VF page for the custom layout.

This feels way over the top considering I would have thought that such a restriction would have been possible via a user profile. (They certainly were for portal users...which this community site is intended to replace)

I would have to contact with a developer to create such a VF page and I really am hoping there is a simpler way.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Per Kier's wonderful response below here is what I've done:

1. I created a new home page layout without anything on LHS or wide column:
2. I added that home page layout to both 3 user profiles that are related to the communities site project I had thought that the problem might be related to the user licenses that our community users have - gold partner. here is a dummy example record:
3. But my community pages still look the same. :(

So somehow I'm still missing a crucial step. Any chance you can see what I've failed to do?

++++++

Keir - your not calling it hidden for nothing! Check out all the different places I've tried the change the profile and STILL can't find anything will cause the community layout to change:

And here is what our sites look like:

Answer 1

Note: the answer below only works for published communities, where you can actually login as a user with a different profile. When the community is unpublished, you can only preview it as the user you are currently logged in as, at least as far as I can tell, so you will see the home page/sidebar configuration for your user as opposed to a user licensed to login to the portal.

Go to Setup -> Customize -> Home -> Home Page Layouts and click the Page Layout Assignment button, which brings up the list of profiles and their associated layouts:

Click the 'Edit Assignment' button allows you to choose a home page layout to assign to a profile:

So just create yourself a new home page layout without the items you aren't interested in, and then assign this to the profile(s) of the users that you are going to login as.

I've removed everything from my sidebar and it looks like this: