A new blogging platform

Hello,
I’m planning on setting up a blogging platform targeting a specific audience. I know I should create a network and a database to keep my future users data there. What I want to ask is can I turn my “home” page as a static website and make only users websites into blogs? Or if I want my users to create blogs do I also need to manage a blog myself?
As a side note – could you recommend me any theme crating plug-ins? I’m still new to wordpress. Of course I’ll keep on looking but since I’m writing here already then why not.
Thank you all

Cheers