Simple theme for three-page site?

Themes
1

I’m trying to make a fairly minimal static site - a front page with two further pages which can be reached from the menu. I don’t want any pages that aggregate summaries of other pages, nor any ‘next/previous issue’ links, or anything like that, as it’s not a newsletter or blog and any updates will be made to the existing pages. Each page will likely just consist of a title, header image, and typical text content.

Is there a theme (not necessarily free) that fits these requirements? The customization options for the various free themes seem very limited and I’m unsure whether the paid options give more control. I’m happy to make some edits myself, but I do require something that won’t require hours of editing to make it work the way I want.

2

You can do this with pretty much any theme. Build your content as pages, and create a routes.yaml file to make one of them your custom homepage. Link to the others.

However, I am not sure Ghost is the right choice. You can do what you’re trying to do with it, but it seems like you’re missing out on all the things it does best!

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply - I was unaware of routes.yaml and it does appear to give me the last piece of the puzzle I’m looking for.

Looking at these instructions: Ghost Themes - Dynamic URLs & Routing

And, combining that with the ‘loading data’ instructions above it, I’d change the routes section to look like:

routes:
  /:
    template: page     <---- assuming I want the front page to look like the others          
    data: page.my-main-page-slug

Is that roughly correct?

4

I genuinely can’t remember (or maybe never knew) if the order makes a difference, but I always follow the code examples which would mean you’d put template last :sweat_smile:

routes:
  /:     
    data: page.my-main-page-slug
    template: page

Yes, use page as the template unless you have a custom one to add!

But you’re on the right track, this is how I do it on my personal site right now.

5

Okay, the good news is that I have got the routing set up the way I like. Thanks for the help above.

However, I’m still looking for a theme that gives me a decent degree of control over the visuals. Most of the free ones are very minimalistic but I’d like to have a bit more going on - for example, to have a title and a wide image near the top, with the start of main text visible without needing to scroll.

Example: Nature's Calendar November

Or, to have the banner image wrap around and be part of the background, like this BBC page: BBC Two - Big Little Journeys, Series 1, Episode 1

I’m happy to make adjustments to the hbs templates if they have elements that I don’t need (for example, I might have to remove the ‘excerpt’ from the page) but I’m less competent with visual styling so I’d like to start with a good-looking theme and then customize the content to my needs.