There are two main pieces to what goes on the front page of a Drupal
site: "blocks", which are navigation links and other short-form
content, and "nodes", which are the content that users on a site create.

Blocks

By default, all blocks appear on the front page of the site, but this can be configured. See the "Configuring Individual Blocks" section of the instructions on block settings for more information.

"Promoted to front page" and "Sticky at top of lists"

If you have the "administer nodes" permission, when creating a new
page, personal blog entry or any other type of content, you have the
option for that item to appear on the front page by selecting "Promoted
to front page". We have more information on promoting (and demoting) items to the front page with examples.

Also,
if you have the "administer nodes" permission, you will also see and
option called "Sticky at top of lists", and this means that it always
appears at the top of the site. This is useful for the following
situations (though this is not an exhaustive list):

• something that you wish to have brought to the readers' attention, such as an upcoming special event
• you want the about page to always appear on the front page
• content that you wish to feature for a period of time, such as an article by a guest writer

Administrators can configure what types of content automatically go to the front page and which are 'sticky' and there are more than one way to put existing content to the top of the front page.

Advanced

You can set any Drupal page to be the front one. This makes it easy
to have a static front page and have a news or other dynamic sections
elsewhere.

In administer » settings, the Default front page
field controls this. Enter in the local path to another page of your
site to have that be the front -- this could be something like the Forum or it could be a specific, single page -- e.g. node/23.

By default, the front page is simply node, which means the content promoted to the front page, as well "sticky" content of all types.

Once you have changed the front page to to something other than node, the Article module is a useful way to collect all the story posts or other node types in one place. Alternately, you can just place a link to http://www.example.com/node somewhere; all posts with the promoted box checked will continue to appear there.