Manageable content areas

I’m relatively new to WordPress theming, and I’m more of an xHTML/CSS guy, but I’m working on a new site in WP and I have a few questions.

I’ve followed a nice tutorial and the theme is in WP, but I’m having a problem with a couple of things:

The front page of the website has 3 content areas that I want to have editable. This is more like content management than a blog for this portion of the site. How would I achieve this? I thought that maybe I could use 3 different categories and call each of those categories where I want them to go so that you could edit the post with that category in the WP admin panel to change those areas,.. but I can’t find how to do this or even if it’s the right solution.

Thanks for any help!