The Home page template is for your intranet’s front page. It has no fixed content of its own: the page is built entirely from widgets that you place in five widget areas, with an optional emergency message at the top and a campaign message at the bottom. Choose it in the Page Attributes box of the page you use as the homepage, as described in Change a page layout.
Set the page as the front page
Go to Settings, then Reading. Under Your homepage displays, select A static page and choose your homepage as Homepage. Two things depend on this: the Homepage box with the emergency and campaign messages only appears on the edit screen of the page chosen here, and the jumbo search box option in Search options only applies to this page.
The five homepage widget areas
Go to Appearance, then Widgets. The areas are named Homepage full-width, Homepage first column, Homepage hero area, Homepage second column and Homepage third column. An area that has no widgets takes up no space. On a desktop screen they are arranged like this:
- Homepage full-width runs across the whole width above everything else. Use it for a search box, a carousel or a row of quick links.
- Homepage first column is the left half of the page and runs the full height. This is the usual home of the news widget.
- Homepage hero area sits at the top of the right half, the full width of that half. It suits an intravert, a featured story or a video.
- Homepage second column and Homepage third column sit side by side beneath the hero area, each a quarter of the page width. Use them for the shorter lists: events, need to know, vacancies, how do I, blog posts.
On a phone the areas stack in one column in that order: full-width, first column, hero, second column, third column. On a tablet the second and third columns stay side by side under the first column. For which widgets to put where, see Setup widgets on the homepage and Available widgets. If the areas are missing from the Widgets screen, see My homepage doesn’t show any widgets.
The page content is not shown
The Home page template does not display anything typed in the main editor. The page title is only read out by screen readers. If you want a welcome message or a block of text on the homepage, put it in a Text widget in one of the widget areas, or in the campaign message described below.
Emergency message
On the front page’s edit screen, below the editor, the Homepage box has an Emergency message style dropdown. The default is Hide. Choose Green, Blue, Amber or Red for a coloured alert box, or Blank for the message with no box around it. Once a style other than Hide is chosen, the Emergency message editor appears. Whatever you write there is shown above all the widget areas, on the homepage only. Use it for building closures, IT outages or anything everyone must see today, and set the style back to Hide when it is over. The message is kept, so you can turn it back on without retyping it.
Campaign message
The Campaign message editor in the same box appears at the very bottom of the homepage, below all the widget areas, whenever it has content. It is a full editor, so it can hold images, links, video or a shortcode. Use it for a standing message that should not compete with the news, such as a values statement or a link to a long-running campaign. For rotating promotions with targeting, use an intravert instead: see Place intravert widgets.
Upgraded from the old theme
If your homepage widgets were set up on the previous theme, the first column, hero area, second column and column 3 top area are carried over to the new names. The old column 3 bottom area no longer exists, so any widgets that were in it need to be placed again, usually in the third column. See Update the homepage manually.