Before I install WordPress…

I’ve had a look around on the WordPress wesbite, looked at various blogs, and skimmed through what looks to be excellent documentation on the WP codex.

My question is this….

I want to create a homepage that doesn’t display a list of articles/posts in the typical blog fashion, meaning I don’t want my homepage to appear as a straight list of posts from top to bottom.

Is it easy enough to create a unique homepage by pulling posts from the database and displaying them any way I see fit? For example, I might want to display the newest post in a highlighted box at the top of the page and then display 3 or more older posts in a less prominent fashion with simple summaries, then followed by a simple list of, say, 10 links to the posts that are even older.

I hope I’ve explained this well enough. I was just curious to know whether such a thing is possible, before I committ to WordPress.

Thanks in advance.