Featured posts in horizontal bar 1

I am trying to use horizontal bar 1 as a place to display 3 featured posts without having to hardcode the links into the theme. Here is what I have tried so far:

$horizontal_bar1 = '<div class="horbar1">
<div class="featurebox"><a href=" '. get_tag_link(9) .' ">'. get_the_excerpt(66) .'</a></div>
<div class="featurebox"><a href=" '. get_tag_link(10) .' ">Title of post here</a></div>
<div class="featurebox"><a href=" '. get_tag_link(11) .' "></a></div>
</div>';

I did this in the bfa_header_config file and you can probably see that I was thinking I could use specific tags for those posts that I want to feature ("feature 1", "feature 2", etc.) and they correspond to the tag id's (9, 10, etc.). I know it probably looks pretty messy cuz I've never used php. The tag thing is working as far as getting me the link to the specific post I want to feature. But my problem is that I want to also get the post title between the <a href> and </a> using another function if possible. And then I want to take an excerpt of that same post to put below the respective titles. So far I've found that I need to get the post ID and the php functions I've found to do that need to be put into "The Loop" (scary! lol). But I don't want to hardcode the ID into this because my featured posts will change from time to time. I just want to be able to slap on a feature tag in the backend and get it to show up in the featurebox. I got this far but now I feel like I'm in way over my head. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.