Question about home/front page

I want to dumb the zen cart down entirely for the purpose of a store I am doing. I will have about a maximum of about 20 products. All I want the customer to see when they come to the retail side of the page is ALL the products I have in the store. I was able to turn off both side columns but not sure how to get the front page to just show everything offered and allow the customer to order from there. Can this be easily done? If so, how? Be gentle.

One way would be to put all your products into one category and then make all those products featured products. Set your maximum featured product display to 20 and all will show up under the "Featured Products' bar. Don't like that title you can change it in the english.php file to whatever you want it to read.

Although I've not done it there is an admin setting to always start with a category. Don't know if that lists products but it can't hurt to experiment.

I want to do the same thing but I don't want to put all my items in the same category. It is already set up the way that I want it but I want the customer to see this page
http://mirandacastro.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
instead of the index page.

Any ideas? Thanks!

There is zero benefit to opening to the shopping cart page when the cart is empty. If you want people to see your current home page text, why don't you want to open with it? Enabling the Featured centerbox and making all products featured should show them all below your text. There are various options for category display that may work for you; we would have to know what else would be acceptable to you in order to make further suggestions.

Configuration > Layout Settings >
Categories show on Main Page
and
Main Page opens with Category

will open to the product listing page for category x if you set that category's id to open.

Yes, you can totally strip it. Most of what I think you want to do is in the css file. Look around in there and you will begin to find what you can hide. I choose to leave it mostly intact by just commenting out what I didn't want.