Static and blog homepage

Hey everybody!
Quite a noob here; I’m using WordPress to build a news/affiliate site and my aim would be creating a homepage with a fixed/static element (where to put an intro text or welcome message or something like that) and, at the bottom, pulling in posts from the blog (with featured image and thumbnail). I tried different themes but almost no one seems to have this simple feature! Perfect example of what I’m aiming for is http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/

Maybe this is very simple but everytime I find pretty complex topics around it and no easy solutions or plugins.
I think it’s weird that a powerful editor such as WordPress is missing this as an easy customizable feature.

Thanks everybody!