Re: Blocks on Frontpage
If I’m not mistaken, I believe you’ve been inspired by http://www.workathomemommies.com/ 
If you want to learn how to widgetize a page so you can put whatever you want on it, here’s a great tutorial:
http://wpmu.org/how-to-widgetize-a-page-post-header-or-any-other-template-in-wordpress/
If you just want to style the appearance of blog posts on your frontpage, you can do that through CSS.
There are any number of great resources and tutorials in the vast wilderness of cyberspace to help you learn what you need to know. To help you identify exactly what you need to change in your theme’s CSS to get the effect you want, I highly recommend installing the Firebug for Firefox addon:
http://getfirebug.com/
Hope this helps!
