Drupal Articles » Drupal home page creation techniques » Methods of creating Drupal home pages » Creating "home" regions to use in your page.tpl.php template file
You can design/code your whole home page's content within the same main template file that the rest of your site's pages use (page.tpl.php), by wrapping the following bit of PHP code around all the code/content that is meant to be shown only for the home page:
If Drupal sees that the front page is currently being viewed ($is_front = true), it will display the contained code - otherwise it will completely skip it as if it didn't exist:
<?php if ($is_front) : ?>
... everything that's for the front page including hard coded HTML and text and/or addition Drupal regions you could define in template.php (such as a new region called "home" and assign any Views blocks you make for use on the home page to this region at admin/build/block) ...
<?php endif; ?>You can even embed one or more Views directly in the template file here if you'd like.
Learn more about making new custom regions (regions in Drupal 5 and regions in Drupal 6), and placing blocks into those regions.
Reference: HowTo build your home page with regions/blocks
