The main content area in any Joomla! home page is driven by the Front Page Component—it's the thing that tells Joomla! what to display in the main content area (the mainbody) of the home page. When you've installed Joomla! with the sample data, the home page mainbody will show:
One introductory article text over the full width of the mainbody
Four intro texts divided into two columns
A list of links to other articles
You can see this in action in the screenshot at the beginning of this chapter.
This default setup is suited for many types of content rich sites. But you're certainly not limited to using this one combination of intro texts and links in the home page mainbody. Joomla!'s Front Page Component offers you a vast amount of choices on how to display content in it, and what to display.