Remove Items from Template Homepage

Question

I've never used Wordpress but am considering it for a responsive church website.

BEFORE I purchase space froom a webhost here's my question preceded by a scenario I want: Scenario: I want my landing page to be very simple. A header, horizontal links below the header, a horizontal slide show beneath the links and then a very simple statement about the church then a footer. That's it. I want the visitor to see everything without scrolling down that particular page (inside pages don't matter).

Question: If I use a responsive Wordpress template, can I delete the items from the landing page I don't want on it?

Thanks

Answer 1

As long as you don't break the PHP or the HTML markup you can delete anything you want. I'd recommend building a child theme over editing one, and you'd want to steer clear of commercial themes that have restrictions on what you can do to the theme, but otherwise there is no reason you can't have a minimal front page like that. The limiting factor is going to be technical ability.

Answer 2

The WordPress template system operates under a hierarchy that determines the appropriate template file to use to render the current page, depending on the current context.

Thus, if you want to have a specific layout for the site front page (note: in WordPress parlance, the "homepage" is referred to as the site front page, and home refers to the blog posts index page), you simply create a template file named front-page.php, and WordPress will use that template file to render the site front page.

Since you have complete control over the template file, you can define its markup however you want.