Can someone point me to the direction of how to make a page like the initial homepage on xoops.org?

I am making a site where I want a static block on the top of every page and the initial home page should be the last couple news items.

I haven't quite gotten the knack for how this all works so a tutorial on how to add basic content would be great! I have the news module as well as smartsecion and neither of them are real obvious how to do this.

I want a nice clean home page like is here on this site.