[theme: twentyeleven-child] Display posts static homepage

Hello all

My site: https://www.gotodesigns.co.uk/ is a child of the twentyeleven theme. I have made the front page static in the reading menu, and made a page for the blog and selected this also.

I made a custom page template for the front page called template-home.php. I will link to this below now to give a clearer understanding of what i have done and my processes thus far.

Code for template-home.php: https://pastebin.com/x2VpFWWm

So i have the template name and the includes at the top and the loop part within the news-left div. I got the idea for this here: https://www.corvidworks.com/articles/wordpress-content-on-other-pages

What i would like to be able to do is add the permalink(ie, the active link as it appears on the top of the blog page, so the post header clicks through to the post) to the top of each post excerpt displayed on the front page, get rid of the space between the end of the excerpt and the read more link, and more importantly perhaps i`d like to be able to pull in the featured image thumbnail for the post.
And finally i`d like to be able to add a <hr> line under each post so it appears as it does on the blog post, with each post seperated with a line.

Is there a better/updated way to approach what im doing here? Or is the link to the corvidworks post still good practice and good to go ahead with. Oh and im very new to both WordPress and PHP, so try and go easy on me ??

Many many thanks for looking.

Regards

Marcus