Awesome's "tile" layouts can do a whole lot - enough that I only ever use tile and max.
The tile layouts have a primary area and a secondary area. There are four different tile layouts with the primary area either on the left, right, top, or bottom. Once you pick one of those, you can control how many windows are in the primary area - the rest fill the secondary area. You can split the secondary area into divisions and increase or decrease the number of divisions; it will fill each division with windows in a round-robin style, placing the new window in the primary area - if the primary area is full, the oldest window gets pushed into the secondary area.
Of course, if you open a window and specifically want to move it to the secondary area, it's as simple as giving focus to that window and moving it down the stack.
This might sound complicated, but the keybindings are quite natural once you learn them (kind of like vim). All the window manager shortcuts start with the [mod4] ("windows") key. It's that with j/k to cycle up and down the stack, add [shift] to shift the position of the window in the stack. It's the [mod4] key with h/l to increase/decrease the size of the primary area; add [shift] to that to increase/decrease the number of windows in the primary area or [ctrl] to increase/decrease the number of subdivisions (I remember "C"ontrol "C"olumn, even though it's not columns if you're using a layout with the primary on the top or bottom).
You might wonder how one could use tile mode for everything: what if you're coding away (which usually involves several terminals open), then you need to open gitk - one of those tiny panes is way too small! Well, you don't need to change the whole layout for that; you can toggle properties on individual windows to add either fullscreen [mod4]+f, maximized [mod4]+m, or floating [mod4]+[ctrl]+[space].