WordPress as a CMS

I wish to see more discussion about using WordPress as a CMS. More specifically, from my point of view, I would like to see more discussions about using WordPress to build a static webpage.

A search on this forum found some scattered discussions. I would like to see more, or better, a separate sub-forum dedicated to it.

With this post, I hope to bring up more discussions. But first I need to confess that I am an absolute new comer to WordPress ( My experience with WP has been about two weeks). So what I wrote below may be naive or wrong.

After days of searching, reading and experimenting, I managed to bring my homepage to the way it looks now: http://qchen.byethost5.com/ Of course it is not done yet. Many contents are missing, and will be filled in soon. For design, I still need to change the default image in the header, and replace RSS by a small “site admin” button. Currently I am stuck at the second task, but I am sure I will manage it once I gain more knowledge about CSS.

Instead, I think I have one fundamental question about the capability of WordPress as a CMS. In my opinion, WordPress, as it is now, is basically oriented toward blogging. It treats each static page as an one-page blog entry. So when I use wp_list_pages( ) to list the pages I created, it by default lists all of them. In order to be a better CMS for static website, it certainly has to treat webpages more discreetly. For example, it needs to know which webpages are important and need to be listed, and which are sub-pages and need not to be listed. Is WordPress capable to do this now? If yes, how?

Thank you all for any input!