How to display blog posts on a dedicated page?

I’m in the middle of moving to WordPress from another CMS. I definitely have to keep the links intact, which are like this:

• example.com (Redirects to /blog)
• example.com/blog (The blog, displaying all the articles)
• example.com/blog/article (A specific article)
• example.com/about (A static page)
• example.com/portfolio (Another static page)

Right now, however, only the static pages work as expected. I cannot figure out how to create a new custom “blog” page and display the blog posts on that, and how to remove the front page alltogether, making it redirect to the blog instead.

Furthermore, I’m using the zBench theme, which always displays the “Home” tab which will lead to the front page. Instead, I want my tabs like this: “Blog”, “About”, “Portfolio” – no “Home”.

A similar question has been asked before:
How to get the list of posts in a static page other than front page?

But this seems like a hack, and not really the same problem I have. I do want to display the blog on the front page, I just want to rename it in both URL and on the tab.

Setting your permalinks as /blog/%postname%/ will solve your structure problem.

In your theme, drop in a home.php file which redirects the user to /blog/ and you can set the blog to appear on a page with slug blog as the blog in your Settings > Reading

Regarding the menu, you would have to take a look how your theme works. If its using WP 3.0 menus, then you can easily change them in the dashboard itself else if its calling wp_list_pages(), then you need to use the exclude parameter of the function to exclude a particular page from showing. http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_list_pages