4 blocks on the Node page for the home page

I am using Drupal 4.7.

There is a design that I want to achieve but not too sure what's the best way to do so.
What I want is to have my home page (and only the home page) to have 4 areas in the middle (ie. where the node is usually displayed). Each of those areas would have text and links to other parts of the site. Basically those 4 areas are promoting 4 type of content on my site.

Thinking about it I came to the conclusion that the easiest way would be to create a node of type Page, set the home page to that particular node. That node will have an HTML body that will contain the tables done in a way to have my 4 squares. That is ok but this is not easy for a non html person to update.

My second idea would be to create a new content type, have 4 "Body" section in that new type. And then create a new node-NEWTYPE.tpl.php that would put the 4 bodies in the 4 different areas.

something like:

    <span class="submitted"><?php print $submitted?></span>
    <span class="taxonomy"><?php print $terms?></span><?php endif; ?>
    <div class="content1"><?php print $content1?></div>
    <div class="content2"><?php print $content2?></div>
    <div class="content3"><?php print $content3?></div>
    <div class="content4"><?php print $content4?></div>

If I go for that then can someone tell me how to create that new type (the exemple I found were by just duplicating the story.module). Or maybe I could use flexinode?

The 3rd option and nicest one would be even more dynamic. i.e. being able to create each Area as a block and put it on the "Node" area of the page. But...how can I do that?

Any thoughts on that?