Answer

Custom Front Page with the Views Module

If you have the Views Module installed, it will create a front page view located at http://example.com/frontpage. You can control the settings for that page at http://example.com/admin/build/views.

To edit the View for this type of custom front page, go to http://example.com/frontpage and click on the "Override" tab. Then create a Drupal View just as you would create any other Drupal View.

If you have the Views Module installed, be sure to block off that duplicate front page with the following robots.txt rule:

Disallow: /frontpage$