How to design a separate home page for a theme?

This question might seem a bit noob-ish, please bear with me! I have zero experience of working with Hugo, but I’ve forked an existing theme hoping to make a relatively simple change to the theme.

Here’s all that I want to accomplish - I want a separate “home” page - or a landing page - for an existing theme, at the same time, moving the “listing” page (the current home page, that lists all posts) to say the “site” page (that should be available at localhost/site).

I can already replace the contents of layouts/_defaults/list.html to create the landing page, or add a new page at layouts/home.html - what I cannot figure is is “how” to have a separate /site page and have it display the current home page.

Here’s what I’ve done so far

  • I’ve tried to create a page site.html in layouts directory of my theme - to no avail.
  • I’ve tried placing the start.html page inside layouts/_default and layouts/partials, again failing both times
  • I’ve already gone through this answer to a similar question, but I could not understand anything through the links posted
  • Yes, I’ve gone through the documentation as well (it was very… cryptic?)
  • My only prior experience with an SSG was using a Jekyll theme (which I also modified a bit for my needs)

I am new to Hugo too. The way I did this is to have all posts inside a folder (let’s say “site” in your case" and when you navigate to /site/, you will see your posts (as long as the layout is present in /layouts/default (I created a section.html for my case). I modified mine a bit by placing an _index.md file inside the site folder with url: /site/ in the frontmatter.

Instead of modifying the theme, just copy the necessary files to the root layouts folder of your Hugo project.

Create an file called site.md in the content directory.

If you want a specific layout, you can use this explanation:

Nice! That looks better. I will test that on my site for one section.