Widget questions and other things.

I installed WordPress this week on a new test version of the site I run. We decided it would be better for posting and we realised we were very behind the times. I have a few questions that I’d love some help with. I suspect these are easy answers, but I’m an absolute noob when it comes to new things. I’ll learn quickly though ??

Firstly, I can’t seem to activate an archive widget? Is this just because a month has yet to pass? I have put a few test posts on the site, but no widget appears on the right of my theme.

I would like to create a small widget on the right which basically is a summary of all the latest site changes (so if I’ve installed a new theme or something else). As well as this I’d like to have other similar widgets that contain the most recent posts from those pages or a few links to other sites or places.

One more thing, we want an opening post that is always at the top or a information box (I believe I know how to do that bit, but not the first post bit) with some links and such in. We are not sure which we will have but we’ll figure that out, either way it would be nice to know how to do something like that just in case ??

I’ll probably have more questions at some point, but fingers crossed not.

Are there any widgets/plugins that you guys would recommend as well?

Thanks