It’s pretty easy to set whatever page you want as your homepage. The WP Codex has pretty detailed instructions on how you can do it.
But basically you create two pages, one for your homepage and another page for your blog (or news or whatever else you want to call the dynamically generated content–or none at all). You can then set your custom page as the homepage in the admin. Also in order to have clean urls you’ll have to set your permalink structure.
The menu editor in WordPress allows you to create a custom menu and then to show it on a location in your site, depending on the template. It’s not that different from Joomla’s functionality there.
As far as menu display goes, you’ll have to either find a theme that has the main navigation menu on the left side, edit the theme template or probably simply just use a widget to display the custom menu.