If you look at this page, you’ll see the Alternate Home page template in action. The following steps will show you how to set a page to appear like this.
1. Create a New Page
In your WP dashboard, click Pages >> Add New, and give your new page a title.
2. Select Alternate Home Page Template
Find the Page Attributes metabox to the right of the post editor, and select the Alternate Home template from the drop-down list of templates.
3. Add Widgets to Alternate Home Page
In your WP dashboard, click Appearance >> Widgets, and you will see 5 different widgetized areas for the Alternate Home Page.
1. Alt Home Page Full-Width Top
2. Alt Home Page Left (One-Third Width)
3. Alt Home Page Middle (One-Third Width)
4. Alt Home Page Right (One-Third Width)
5. Alt Home Page Full-Width Bottom
To understand the layout of these widgetized areas, click the thumbnails to the right. You may add content to any of these widgetized areas, or not. However, the Left, Middle and Right widgets need to be used together. In other words, if you use one, you need to use each of them or your page layout will appear odd.
You can also use the Column styles show on this page to create various width content areas in either of the Full-Width widgetized areas.
4. Optional: Select Page as the Home Page
After you publish the page, you may want to use it as your home page. To do that, you’ll just need to change the site settings. In your WP dashboard, click Settings >> Reading, and select “Static Page” for the “Front page display” field. In the drop-down list of pages, select the new page you just created. You may also want to create a separate page to serve as your Blog page, and you would need to select that page as the Posts Page.
