how to create and index page

Hi, I have two questions:

1. Can anyone point me to a tutorial on how to create an index page from scratch -creating configuration and any necessary template files? My google searches were not successful.
2. Is there an in-depth API guide you guys can recommend? I found squarespace's to be good for a cursory introduction. But it leaves many question marks. A lot of the properties in JSON files are not clearly described and this leads to errors and frustrations.

Thank you so much.