changing index.php & blog page

Hello, I’m new to word press and so far it seems pretty cool but I am having one issue. I would like wordpress to run my entire site but I do not want the blog section to be the home or index page. I have looked around the site and found a few pages that discussed similar topics but I believe they referred to taking the site out of word press, this is not what I am looking for. I would like my index page to be a welcome page explaining the site with dynamic links to the blog, which is not the main focus of the site. I would like all of the pages within the same directory. Is this possible? and if so does anyone know of any topics which discuss exactly how to do this? Thanks in advance.