While WordPress is pushed as blogging software, it can also be used quite effectively to turn out a standard web site, like this one.

What makes a blog site different than a web site is the continuing changes on the home page because of the continuing posts.  And, because the posts roll off the end, you have things like "Archives", "Recent Posts", "Calendar", "Categories", etc, on the sidebar to help the readers find older posts.

On a web site, the home page doesn’t change.  This is achieved in WordPress by a setting that makes a specific page the home page and doesn’t display the posts.  Since nothing’s rolling off the end, you’d eliminate any related items  ("Archives", "Recent Posts", etc) in the sidebar, leaving just the links — and there’s your standard web site.
 

First, make your home page a ‘page’.  Then go to Settings, ‘Reading’, and click the ‘static page’ button.  Select your ‘Front page’ from the menu and save the settings.

If for some reason a comments box is appearing at the bottom of the home page, edit the home page, click on ‘Screen Options’ and select ‘Discussion’, then uncheck ‘Allow comments’ in the ‘Discusson’ box down below.
 

The one thing that might take a bit of effort on your part — if you’re really trying to make it look like a web site — is eliminating some of the blog-type stuff displayed on the page, like "posted by", "date", "category", etc.  What’s displayed is determined by the theme, which means you’ll have to use the dreaded Theme Editor to find the snippet of code that’s inserting the bit of info onto the page.  This is thoroughly covered in the ‘Theme tweaks’ page.

It can go pretty quick, though, in the sense that if the page is displaying "Posted by", you can search through the various pages in the Theme Editor for "Posted by" and that’ll be the block of code you eliminate.

For example, if you wanted to get rid of the line that has the time & date on it, look for a line that says something like:

<h3><span class="posted"><?php the_time(‘l j F Y’,display); ?></span></h3>

"Time" being the keyword.  I found the above line in two or three of the files in the Theme Editor but it was eliminating the one in the ‘Main Index Template" that did the trick.  There were two instances of the above code on the page, one for the date at the top of the home page and one for the date at the top of the individual pages, so I wiped out both.
 

Banner Pic

When it comes to picking the theme, you’ll notice that the vast majority of themes don’t have a picture in the banner, just the blog’s name, maybe the Tagline, perhaps a search box and perhaps icons for the pages — but no picture.  Since a standard business web site is more-or-less expected to have some kind of logo in the banner, you’ll probably want to use a theme that already has a pic there.  Then you simply name your own banner pic the same as the one in the theme, make sure it’s the same size, then just overwrite the original with your own.

Note that the size of the displayed pic is determined by the code, not the actual size of the pic.  And while it seems odd, the pic’s name and size are usually on the main Style page, not the Header page.  It’s ‘projected’ onto the header from the Style page.

As far as pic formats go, although the WordPress themes tend to use the PNG format, they also understand JPG.  So, if the original header pic is "header.png" and your image studio doesn’t save in PNG format, just save it as a JPG and change the extension to "header.jpg" in the code.