Add News Feed to bespoke website, only to one page on whole site

Question

I have built a bespoke website that is not currently managed by WordPress. For SEO purposes and to announce special offers etc, my client would like to add a News Feed to the site. To save me having to write a bespoke CMS for a single page, I would like to implement WordPress on just this particular page.

I am currently very confused as to how WordPress works as, believe it or not, there is too much information on the net and resultantly I am just left baffled...

I was therefore hoping that someone may be able to answer a few of my queries, thus pointing me in the right direction for creating this WordPress powered News Feed.

Here are my questions:

1. In Plesk, it offers me to install WordPress on a site, how does this differ to just copying the WordPress directory to my site and going through the steps on the pages?
2. Is there a particular part of WordPress that I should be looking at in order to implement a custom News Feed?
3. I have noticed that there are PHP wp_* functions, is there documentation for these?
4. Does it matter which directory WordPress is installed in? i.e. if my website is at httpdocs/, should I be placing WordPress into httpdocs/wp/?
5. Where does my client go to to login to WordPress? I assume it will be http://domain.com/wp/, is this correct?
6. Does WordPress manage all of the data as in images, text etc? Obviously it stores the text in the DB, but what directory does it store all the images in?
7. I will inevitably be implementing an infinite scroll on the News feed page, therefore, how would I go about retrieving the data from the database, with limits for paging etc?

I have never used WordPress before, so please forgive my naivety...
Please note, I am not asking you to write the code for me, I simply need pointing in the right direction.

Answer 1

The best place to get started is the Codex. Search for my question codex and you'll probably get the info. Or simply function_name, and follow the link that leads there. And, surely enough, searching here at WPSE or at SO.

1. I only used the automated install once, but it updated WP on its own and I cannot tell if this behavior is normal or not. Most of the times it's not something that you do without consent or doing a backup first.

2. Those are Posts (ordered chronologically and organized by taxonomies -categories and tags). A "News Feed" can be extracted from them.

3. You can start in Function Reference. The important functions (and classes and APIs) are well documented.

4. No, it doesn't matter which directory WP is installed: Giving WordPress Its Own Directory.

5. http://example.com/wp/wp-admin if installed in /wp directory.
   This shortcut also works: http://example.com/wp/admin.

6. http://example.com/wp/wp-content is the custom files directory. Contains themes, plugins, language files, uploads. A basic backup consists of database plus wp-content.

7. The feed is one thing (a RSS feed http://example.com/wp/feed) and the posts page another (a regular index webpage http://example.com/wp). See Template Hierarchy. There are plenty of Infinite Scroll solutions out there. The plugin Jetpack has one (along with a variety of other modules).