Proper way of establishing custom landing pages in WordPress

Question

Within WordPress 4.6.1, with the TwentySixteen theme, I have 2 general questions in regards to establishing a landing page.

• From within my child theme folder, where and how do we create a new page to be the new landing page of our site? This page will have a custom coded look and feel. Where in wp-admin do we tell WordPress (please select this to be the default landing page). I don't want to replace index.php, I simply want to create landing page templates.

• When using TwentySixteen, I see how easy it is from wp-admin to set a "Page" to be the default landing page of the site. And I see it comes with "Default Template" and "My Custom Template". Where do we edit these two template files? I would like to create my own template file for my "Page" as well.

Answer 1

reference WordPress Codex on Templates

A quick, safe method for creating a new page template is to make a copy of page.php and give the new file a distinct filename. That way, you start off with the HTML structure of your other pages and you can edit the new file as needed.

To create a global template, write an opening PHP comment at the top of the file that states the template’s name.

<?php /* Template Name: Example Template */ ?>