Giving more hierarchy to posts

I’m trying to fix some workflow problems at a site I’m working with, and I think WordPress may be the way to go. I can get almost everything I want, except this one feature … Hopefully, you can point me at how I can do this.

I’d like to have one dominant post on a topic page, followed by three smaller items. I want to rank the items in a way that I select the dominant item, and then select the order of the next three — without all being reverse chronological based, but rather by me picking.

What’s the best way to look at this theming issue?