Custom theme questions – Showing a single post

Hello.

This is my first encounter with wordpress and the wordpress template system. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading in the codex area but am stumped on a few points..

I’ve created a site dizkis.co.uk/test/ which has static pages but dynamic content. On the home page I’m trying to show an excerpt (or post text) from one post in each of the lower boxes and the main content area (i.e a different post in each div). Is there a way of doing this?

Also, when referencing images, for example the twitter bird, do you always have to type the full path to the image in the theme folder? as a simple relative images/twitter.gif doesn’t seem to function correctly. If this is the case, when all the images are moved away from the test site, all the image links will require changing.

I’m still learning , so trying to get my head around php and wordpress in general.

Thanks