Home page customization

Hello,

I am new to WordPress and am trying to figure out how to customize the home page. I want it to look like a normal webpage. I have read a few post and some other websites on the subject but I cannot get the home.php file to work correctly. What exactly am I supposed to put in the redirect part of the code? It looks like below:

<?php

$homepage = get_option(‘siteurl’).”/home/”;
global $wp; $wp_received_argument = false;
foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;

if ($wp_received_argument) require(TEMPLATEPATH . “/index.php”);
else {
wp_redirect($);
exit();
}

?>