There are numerous ways to put products on your home page, and we’ll compile a list of code snippets you can use on your own store here.
New products
Go to “CMS - Manage Pages” and select “Home Page” from the list of pages.
Use this code snippet to show products labeled as “new” on your front page:
{{block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_homepage" template="catalog/product/new.phtml"}}
(Note that you must have some new products in your catalogue for anything to show when you do this. In this context new doesn’t mean that you’ve recently added them; only products explicitly marked as new using ‘Set Product as New from Date’ and ‘Set Product as New to Date’ options in the ‘General’ product information page in the admin tool will be shown.)