Create a fancy footer and sexy front page – Part 3

Step 1: Know your template hierarchy

WordPress provides us with many templates allowing us to create all sorts of designs. These templates are very powerful and what makes WordPress such a great Content Management System.

For our purpose, we simply want to make our website fancier by creating a unique home page and add a fat footer. Custom Templates can easily be created by creating a new php template and adding a simple comment at the top such as:

 /* Template Name: home page */

This would work and would be fine, but it’s a bit silly since WordPress provides us with a built in Home page template. All you need to do is to create a new template called front-page.php.

Once created, WordPress will automatically use this template to create your home page. So go ahead, duplicate your page.php and rename it front-page.php. Remove all of the loop so that you end up with something like this:

<?php get_header(); ?>
 <div id="main">

	This is our new page.

 </div><!-- end of main div -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Have a look at your home page and if you see the sentence “This is our new page” then you’re good to continue.