On a blog index page, WordPress will automatically show a small excerpt of the content, which by default is a total of 55 words. It doesn’t try to complete a sentence and excerpt to the next period, or even the end of the paragraph. It just cuts off in mid sentence. There are ways to change the built in function for a greater number of words, but it will still cut off when that limit is reached.
WordPress is a pretty amazing platform, but there is definitely a lot of things to explore under the hood as it related to theme development. Most everything can be done within PHP with the appropriate CSS styling to complete the look.
I’ve been able to take the basics of the old site and replicate that under WP, the CSS is going to take a bit of work to tweak though. It has actually been a while since I’ve updated the old site and really paid attention to how things looked. The old site was quite a few years old, and technology has moved ahead over the years, but mostly where I saw this being an issue was with display sizes and resolutions. Newer displays are sharper with higher resolution, and much of the old site seemed far smaller than it was originally meant to look.