How to make this custom homepage?

Hi all,

I am making one for my stepdad. He’s a photographer so I’ve chosen the Minimatica theme. I’m intending to learn how to build a wordpress site as I go along and I’ve got 3 months to complete the task (I do have some VB scripting skills so I’m hoping I’ll be able to learn reasonably well once I get pointed in the right direction).

I’ve found how to set wordpress to a static homepage and have made a custom .php template which I can now select. However I’m now at a loss with to customise it visually. My plan is the following:

Have all menus and footers the same as other pages within the site (so staying in the Minimatica theme).

Have the homepage consist of 3 images which form the sub sections of the site (eg. wedding, pet & landscape photography)

Preferably when you click on each image there is some sort of sliding animation which expands the area out into that section of the site. OR if that’s too tough to do, it’d be cool to have one image when you load the page and this sliding effect allow the user to slide between the 3 sections.

Clearly this is a lot of learning for a n00b and I don’t expect anyone to do this for me but I’m at a loss at where I need to start.

I’d be grateful for any help on what kind of things I should be reading up on in order to customise the homepage and where I make these customisations (the cover page.php?) and a good plugin I could use for the sliding effect.

I did find this tutorial but it’s too advanced for me right now.

Cheers!

Claire