BettyJJ

<h4>Main features of the plugin:</h4>
<ol>
<li>It supports multi-byte language (such as Chinese). It will not produce gibberish as some other excerpt plugins do.</li>
<li>The html tags in the original posts, i.e., the font styles, colors, hyperlinks, pictures and such are preserved in the excerpt.</li>
<li>For better readability, it displays 300 characters for each post on the homepage and 150 characters for each post on archive pages.</li>
</ol>


WP-UTF8-Excerpt

This plugin generates a better excerpt for multi-byte language users (Chinese, for example). Besides, it keeps the html tags in the excerpt.

Micah Wood

<p>The <strong>Custom Front Page</strong> plugin allows to you set any post or page, including custom post types, as the homepage.</p>
<h4>Why?</h4>
<p>Let’s say you have created a ‘landing page’ post type.  This post type provides you with all the input fields and default<br />
design needed to make awesome landing pages easy.  These landing pages are so awesome, in fact, that you decide to use one as your homepage.<br />
But wait, WordPress won’t let you do that… until now!  Just install “Custom Front Page” and you can select any page, post or custom post type<br />
to be the homepage on your site.</p>
<h4>How?</h4>
<p>Using this plugin is simple:</p>
<ol>
<li>Install the plugin</li>
<li>Activate the plugin</li>
<li>Go to ‘Reading’ under ‘Settings’ in the WordPress admin menu and select the desired front page.</li>
<li>Save your changes</li>
</ol>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Works with custom post types</li>
<li>No settings page, just adds additional post types to the front page dropdown</li>
<li>Clean, well written code that won’t bog down your site</li>
</ul>


Custom Front Page

Easily set any page or post, including custom post types, as the homepage for your site.

WP-UTF8-Excerpt vs Custom Front Page