Creating custom widgets to be called from templates

Because of the way pages work in wordpress the wysiwyg totally sucks and using the HTML tab still strips out and messes up my code so I’ve had to resort to hacking this

I don’t know if this is possible basically I want to create a front page with several editable sections, there are 3 boxes (like promo type boxes) and I want the admin to edit them herself so can I create widgets & and call them straight from the template which can then be access from the widgets menu in the dashboard. The admin is not computer savvy and will not be able to edit the template so that’s why I want to make it as easy as possible.

E.g. my code:

<div class="box">
  <img src="images/placeholder-promobox.gif" />
  <h2>Heading</h2>
  <p>Description of this section</p>
</div>
<div class="box">
  <img src="images/placeholder-promobox.gif" />
  <h2>Heading</h2>
  <p>Description of this section</p>
</div>
<div class="box">
  <img src="images/placeholder-promobox.gif" />
  <h2>Heading</h2>
  <p>Description of this section</p>
</div>

And what I want is this:

<div class="box">
  <?php some php code to grab box 1 widget from dashboard ?>
</div>
and so on...

Hope someone can point me in the right direction, many thanks