I need help! with sliders and where they link to and generally being in control.

Hello everyone, I hope you’re wordpress experiences are going smoothly. Mine is not. I tried to muscle through, but remembered that we have a whole world of experienced users. One day I want to help someone else also.
Okay, so here goes…
I have a laboratory. We research new ways to eliminate cancer at its core. I have been trying to make a wordpress site detailing our efforts.

1) I struggle with having a home page with an image slider of a size of my choosing, linking to pages that i would like to choose as well. Even with themes out there, I seem to fail at both of those. The images link to a ‘post’ of just the image and nothing else. Often themes made for sliders and images make it difficult just to find where to appoint images for the slider in the first place. I even went into the code, but there seems to be more than one way to stop me in my efforts to manipulate the site.

2) I want to have posts, but not on the front page. I want to designate those for a page that I entitled ‘News’. Unfortunately, the posts are going everywhere but there.

3) I need to designate one of the ‘menu’ links to a different website for donations. But wordpress does not seem to have a place to change that at my will.

I REALLY need to get back to my research, but I need this site for future funding in order to continue.

If you have any suggestions, I will take any and all of them. FYI, i have no budget for this, which is why I have been doing this on my own.

My initial goal is for the site to have a clean feel to it, very much like the american red cross website. I don’t want viewers to be bombarded with ads, too much text, or too many effects.

Thanks in advance!

-Emil