Help Neeed with 2010 Theme, Post, Excerpts and Permalinks and such…. .

Hellllllppppppp!!!!!!

I have a Website running on the 2010 theme and I’m trying to accomplish the following

• Have all posts show as excerpts instead of full content on my Blog page
• Have a post title show as the meta description tag followed by the name of the blog.
• Have the title of a post be a clickable hyperlink that can navigate to the full
  post.

Here is what I’ve done and researched thus far:

• I’ve checked off the ‘excerpt’ box in screen options. So I now see a field for inputting an excerpt.
• Some instructions indicate to go into the index.php and do the following: find ‘the_content()’ and replace it with ‘the_excerpt()’. Only problem is that the tag (‘the_content()’) isn’t present in any files I looked into. Now what?

For an example of all that I’m trying to accomplish, please see the following: click here. This website does everything I want:
Full post is replaced by an excerpt with a hyperlinked post title instead of the full post content and once a person clicks on the post title, the post title is listed in title bar of browser window followed by the blog name.

To pre-empt a few things: My webguy has disappeared on me so I’m a bit clueless as to PHP coding but am willing to try.

If you do respond, please word your responses in very plain english with very detailed instructions. Thanks.