Excerpts on home page

I’ve been trying to get my excerpts with pictures to show up on my home page.

I’ve looked through a number of posts on this topic and can’t seem to find anything that works.

The main thing seems to be changing:

< ?php the_content(); ?>

to

< ?php the_excerpt(); ?>

However those strings of code don’t show up in 2010 Weaver’s index.php code.

Do I need to change another file or ???

Can anyone lend a hand?

Thanks!