Some developer notes for customizing Drupal.

Start by reading ...
Theme Guide for Drupal 6
Writing Secured Drupal Code

Detecting if at home page

To detect if system is displaying the home page ...

<?php if ($is_front) { ?>
<div>content for home page here</div>
<?php } ?>

Display a Story

To display a story of node id 232 for example, you can do ...

<?php echo node_view(node_load(array('nid' => 232)), false, false, false); ?>

Is Node Story or Page

$node->type will return "story" or "page".