in whichever cms page you want the new products to display. Then all you have to do is specify the new from and to dates within the product information for each product you want to display there.
The bottom text is in app/design/frontend/default/default/template/page/html/footer.phtml I think. I’m not by my files right now, but it’s approximately there. After you change it you MUST refresh your cache or it wont show the changes. The actual extra links (which I took out of mine by disabling them) are in the cms static block footer links.
Let me know if that didn’t clarify what you were asking.
Pretty much all I changed for the layout were the css files. If I changed anything else it was just saying which layout for the cms file to use (2 columns, right etc).