adding (non-blog) dynamic content

I’m new to wordpress. I’m building a site that’s mostly composed of static pages. However, I would like my client to update certain areas without having to pluck through my HTML. So let’s say I have three small content columns on the landing page that give a summary of a few different pages. Is there any way to set the content in some sort of custom field which would be stored in a variable of some sort?

like:

<div id="myBlurb">
    <h2><?php echo $blurb; ?></h2>
    <p><?php echo $stuff; ?></p>
</div>

So the ‘blurb’ and ‘stuff’ variables would come from a custom field in the wordpress admin?