Featured Posts Don't Show After Deleting Static Page

When I originally built the site, I had a static landing page. I’ve deleted it so I can use some of the templates with the featured post section built in but none of them work.

I have tried numerous themes, the Featured Content Gallery plugin and deactivating all plugins. I even went back to using the twenty ten theme and adding each plugin back one at at time, nothing.

I am confident that this is not a template issue at this point, I have to adjust the call somewhere, I’m thinking but I don’t know where. I have WP installed in a directory.

My site is