Build your homepage

Look at the starter homepage

Open your site. With no section pages published, Quiet shows a starter layout: your site title, your site description from Settings → General, and your most recent posts.

Nothing is broken. That layout is what a brand new site should look like, and it keeps working until you replace the top of it in the next step.

Publish the introduction

This is the one band worth doing properly, because it is the first thing a reader sees.

1. Go to Pages → New page.

2. Title it whatever your opening line should be, for example Essays on attention, craft and quiet work. The title becomes the large heading.

3. Write a paragraph or two in the body. That becomes the prose under the heading.

4. Open the settings panel and fill in the Excerpt with a short label, for example Writer and editor. It renders as one small line above the heading.

5. Set a Feature image. That becomes your portrait.

6. Under Tags, add this tag:

   #home-intro

7. Publish.

Reload your homepage. The starter title and description are gone, replaced by your introduction, with the recent-posts list still below it.

Add topic tiles

The topic band is the one section built from something you probably already have: your tags.

1. Tag your writing the way you normally would, and give each of those tags a description and an image in Settings → Tags. The tiles read all three.

2. Create a page. Title it Start anywhere or similar.

3. Under Tags, add this tag and the public tags you want as tiles:

   #home-hub

4. Publish.

The first four public tags become picture tiles. Any beyond the fourth line up underneath as a More topics row, so a page with nine tags shows four tiles and five links.

Details, including how to drop the post counts: Topic tiles.

Decide about Latest writing

The recent-posts list you have seen since step 1 is a real band, and it keeps working with no page at all. Publish a #home-latest page only when you want to change something about it:

• The heading and the line under it. They come from the page's title, excerpt and body.
• Where it sits. Without a page the list stays near the top. With a page, it takes that page's place in the order.
• What it lists. Add a public tag to the page and the list narrows to that tag.

How many posts it shows is a setting rather than a tag: Home latest count, four, six or eight.

Add the signup band

If memberships are on in Ghost, the introduction already has a signup field. A separate band gives email its own moment further down the page.

Create a page, add the tag #home-newsletter, and fill in as much as you want: title becomes the heading, excerpt becomes the small label above it, body replaces the default line of copy, and the meta description becomes the fine print under the field.

Readers who are already signed in never see this band, and neither does anyone if memberships are switched off.

Add the bands you actually need

The remaining six are all built the same way: one page, one tag, publish. None of them is required, and each one hides itself when it has nothing to show.

Each has its own short guide under Homepage sections.

Put the bands in the order you want

Quiet orders the bands by publish date, newest first, with one exception: the introduction is always pinned to the top.

So to move a band up, republish it with a more recent date. To move it down, set an older one. Ghost lets you edit the publish date of a published page in the settings panel under Publish date.

Check the page on a phone

Two bands change shape on a small screen, and both are worth a look:

• Topic tiles become a row you swipe sideways.
• The photo strip and the logo strip drift slowly if there is more content than fits, with a pause button beside the heading. Neither animates for a visitor whose device asks for reduced motion.

Tidy up the section pages

Every section page is still a real page with its own address, so /start-anywhere/ renders on its own. That is occasionally useful and usually not what you want in search results. For each section page, open the settings panel, expand Meta data and turn on Exclude from search engines.

Leaving them indexed does no harm, and removing them from your menu is usually enough.