Static Content at the top of my blog

If you want your message to be displayed only in the homepage, add your text after <?php get_header(); in index.php. Or if you want your text to be displayed on every page, add it in the end of header.php. Also, do not edit the main theme, create child theme.

Or, you could add a text widget to ‘above header’ sidebar and put it there.

Frumph, I ended up going with your suggestion as it was fairly easy to just copy the html of the contents that I wanted to put in above the blog entries into a text widget that I added to the “above blog” section. However, I now have a couple other questions (both related to this effort) now that I have got this most of the way done the way I want it to look.
1) I was hoping to have the background white. However, no updates the the background color in the html seem to change anything using the widget. Would I need to change the background of this template to get it to have a white background? If so where would I update that?
2) Is there a way to shorten the Blog posts more so that its just a quick snapshot of the post and not the whole thing? I tried what I thought was setting it this way but apparently I was mistaken.

If you would like to take a look at the site I am referring to its 32racing.net/home

Sorry if this is too much for one post. I will gladly re-post where necessary if so.