Custom Categories and Thumbnails

If you look on this site under “New Today” or “New This Week” you’ll see that they have thumbnail images with a title and short description and some of them link to a different category. http://sweetspot.ca/
Basically it looks as if each of those thumbnails are individual blog posts that get generated when a new post is created.

I’m trying to recreate this in WordPress and I am not having much luck. I’ve tried playing around with Query posts here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts but with no success.

Would anyone be able to help me out? I’m willing to compensate to achieve this same effect for a client’s website.

Thanks a lot.