How to control directory location of pages created under WP?

I am new to non-static web-design. I wish for the whole new site I am building to be manageable through WP and for this reason installed WP in the root folder.

I would like to combine “regular” pages (PHP pages with relatively unchanging content) with files names such as “[domain]/”, “[domain]/about”, [domain]/topic/sub-topic”, etc. with blog pages whose home page (the one where the latest posting automatically appears) at “[domain]/blog/” (i.e. I in effect need a secondary home page that is the portal to posts, besides the main home page mentioned above), and finally, individual posts appearing at “[domain]/%year%/%month%/%pagename%”.

I would appreciate an explanation of how to control the hierarchy, because I’ve been unable to understand how to do that through the WP interface: In short, how do I tell WP in what folder to put a Page or a Post I create?