Post/updates on Home page. Think I've screwed up

Up until a month ago I really had no clue about HTML, PHP, CSS, WordPress etc and thanks to help from here and various bits n bobs reading off the web I’m pressed on to build a WP site using an Arras theme. I’m not far off finishing and this is what I have so far:

https://www.nes-bit.com/

I was told that the Homepage should show any posts that have been added or updated as I’ve been going along but at no point has anything ever appeared there since I started and I currently have around 350 posts and several pages. Each post has a relevant Page as a parent yet at no time have any posts appeared on a page so I’m thinking I’ve done something wrong that’s removed the process.

On the Homepage I just have some bumf as an introduction to the site but I’d like to be able to post something better than plain old text (all my headers, site database entries have been done that way) and it’s starting to look more like a Word document than a website.

I’d like some boxes to appear on the Homepage in a simple box say with a black bar across the top, text inside, image beneath and text filling the box perhaps with a Read More link on the bottom. I have no idea how to get posts to appear on the home page so maybe some simple HTML design will do the job just as well.

Using my amazing Paint skills this is what I was thinking of:

https://i293.photobucket.com/albums/mm55/Lorfarius/pic.jpg

I could effectively use that to manually insert pics from the WP image up loader, write some blurb in via the text editor and create links for the Read More section to point to relevant pages. Not very pretty I’m sure but functional. I could then copy that over to the Articles page of my site and do the same to create links to more posts.

I’ve been stuck on these for over a week so any help would be greatly appreciated.