custom theme for a static website

Read Administration > Settings > Reading to set your front page to be a static page.

Review Pages to learn how to write and customize the look of said pages.

Read Administration > Appearance > Widgets to add/remove Widgets that you would want to present visitors.

Also see:
https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+plugins+cms
WordPress Semantics

The problem is that I cont seem to find a reasource to let me know which template tags I need. For example, when blogs are needed this tutorial seems appropriate, https://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/building-custom-wordpress-theme/. How would this scenario change if wordpress needed to be used as a pure CMS tool? There is a lot of POST jargon due to the blog scenario, it seems like this would not be needed in the pure CMS scenario or it should be different.

I found the book “WordPress for Dummies” helpful – Author is a WordPress developer. Probably many others out there but I could understand most of this one.