Altering the landing page

[Grimwolf]

I'm having a bit of a bizarre complication with creating my site. Or... very bizarre.
I'm using the Minimum theme. A couple days ago I was working on trying to get the Featured Image and Social Media buttons to show up on my landing page. I activated them under Appearance > Widgets, but they just weren't showing.
So I found out yesterday that they WERE showing, but not on the landing page like they do on the Demo site; they were showing on my "Blog" page for some reason. Following the method given by this tutorial; http://my.studiopress.com/setup/minimum-theme/, there seemed to be no way to control WHICH page those widgets would appear on. They would just always appear on the Blog page.
I decided it was unnecessary to distinguish the Blog overview page from the landing page anyway, so I just deleted my old landing page and designated my old Blog page as the new landing page.
Problem solved, right? All the widgets were appearing on the page I wanted them to now.
Problem is, the landing page is not a "page" technically; it's just http://www.sitename.com. The very base page, so it isn't listed at all under "Pages".
What this means is that I seem to have absolutely no way to edit this page. I can't change the format or the Featured Image or anything like that as far as I can tell.

So having gotten all of that out of the way, here's what I would like to know.
How can I alter the base page, and how do I control which page the widgets appear on?

[Alirat]

When you say 'Landing page' - do you mean a special purpose page that is linked to a campaign for sales purposes or do you mean the Home page?  Looking at the Minimum theme I think you mean the latter but wanted to clarify before offering any advice.

[Grimwolf]

Ah, yeah. I'm still trying to get the terminology down.
I'm talking about the very first page seen after just typing in the name of the site.
It might be easier with an example. Here's the site I'm working on; http://www.grimwolfgallery.com/
Now as you can see the featured image is there, but blank. Ordinarily I could easily assign an image to it by just going to my Pages options, choosing to edit the page, and selecting the Featured Image assigned to it.
But since that is just the very base page, it isn't listed under Pages at all.

If you scroll down you can see the big Facebook Like Me button, which is the widget I was referring to. I added it by following the tutorial and simply going into Appearance > Widgets and adding the code it told me to under the Home Featured #1 section. As far as I can see, there isn't any option to control which page of the site this would appear on.

[Alirat]

Ok - thats the Home page and works a bit differently. Undo everything you have done, or start from scratch. If you look at the widgets section under 'Appearance' you will notice that there are widgets called Home (I am just going by how Studio Press usually does their themes - I don't have Minimum installed anywhere, but I could set it up if my vague instructions are not clear to you).  The Home page is usually widgetised, that is you entered various widgets into the widget areas in that area.

The confusion over the term 'Landing page' is due no doubt to there being a landing page template included with the theme. This is a special purpose page with no sidebar or menu items. It is made that way to lead the viewing person to buy stuff with no distractions. Do not use this page for the home page.

So have a look for the Home page widgets and play around with that to get familiar. Why I said start from scratch is because you may have accidentally done something which will break the normal flow of setting your site up.  When I started with StudioPress I watched the setup videos and that answered a lot of questions for me. I was like you in not being able to get a handle on the Home page concept.

I can give you a hand if you would like a quick demo, but see if you how you go with this first.

[Grimwolf]

What would I need to do to undo everything and place the site back into it's starting condition?

[Alirat]

Oh I answered before I saw all your answer.  You need to create a page with a featured image and then tell the Home page widget which page to use.

The footer widget appears on every page does it not?  (I will check). The footer is usually a part of the site which repeats on every page.

[Alirat]

No - I stand corrected the Social Icons are only for the front/home page they are not in the footer

 

[Grimwolf]

Thank you for the help. 😀

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