Assigning Your Home Page Link

After customising your Home page using the instructions in this article, it is important to consider how your Home, Site and View All menu items are labelled. In some cases, these menu items may need to be re-named to make sense of your Home page customisation.

For example, if you are turning your Home page into an “Enter” (or “Splash”) page, you would then consider your Products page to be your new shop home page. For a complete explanation refer to How should I assign the Home, Site and View All links in my menus?

Product Options

By default your Home page will display your shop’s featured products. Your featured products (which products and how many) are defined by the settings you have chosen via your Customize design > Customize () admin area – refer to How do I use the basic "Customize" options for my Big Cartel theme?

You can further customise – beyond the above-mentioned Customize settings – the display of products on your Home page (e.g. show all products – paginated, show only products from a certain category, set image size, etc.) via your Home Page Custom Options located in your Customize design > Advanced () – Home page code – refer to How do I use the Custom Options for my Big Cartel theme?

Your primary custom options – located at Customize design > Advanced () – Layout – also include settings that affect the display of products on the home and products pages, e.g. hide product details, set price range display type, etc.

Hide Products and/or Insert Custom Content

If you wish to show no products on your Home page, refer to the x ic home option in the following section. If you insert custom content (slideshows, images, etc.) using x ic before home and/or x ic after home, your featured products will still be displayed and controlled by the methods outlined in the paragraphs above.

Content Options

The Insert Content (IC) method is used to create custom content for your home page. It is therefore important that you first read and understand the article Insert Content before proceeding with the instructions below.

Once you have reviewed the article Insert Content you will find that your options for creating your home page content are:

1. x ic before home – insert custom content before the home page products
2. x ic home – replace the home page products with custom content (i.e. do not display products on the home page)
3. x ic after home – insert custom content after the home page products

Create IC Page

Once you have decided which of the above Insert Content options you require, navigate to your Customize design > Pages () admin area and click Add Page icon () to create a new Insert Content page. Name the page according to your IC option.

For example, to replace the home page products with our custom content (i.e. no products will be displayed on the home page) we choose x ic home:

Create Custom Content

You can now enter text and use the edit toolbar to format and add links and images. You can also switch to HTML mode to use HTML tags, shortcode or a page template from the Extras section in your IC page to create your custom Home page content.

You can also enter full screen mode to make editing content easier, by clicking the at the bottom right of the customise area.

Creating a Home Page Image

Using the support article How do I insert an image into my Big Cartel shop page? for reference, an example of code to display a home page image that links to the all-products page:

<div style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-alignment: center;">

<a href="/products"><img src="http://i39.tinypic.com/aemt5j.jpg" alt="Boy on Bike" width="800" height="601" /></a>

</div>

Applying this code in the Big Cartel admin area:

Creating a Home Page Slide Show

Creating a home page slide show is covered in detail in the support article How do I add a slide show to my Big Cartel home page?

Additional Reference

For more information on inserting page content (e.g. videos, text, etc.), refer to other help articles in the Pages & Content support category. For information on using HTML tags, visit w3schools.

Display Content Only

You can choose to display only your content on the home page (i.e. hide all menus, footer and header) via your Primary Custom Options. Primary Custom Options are located in your Customize design > Advanced () – Layout page code (refer to How do I use the Custom Options for my Big Cartel theme?).

The home page settings are located in the {{ STYLE & CONTENT OPTIONS }} option section as follows:

{% assign home_page_content_only = 'no' %}

You can edit this value to ‘yes’ to display your content only. Refer to the Custom Option notes for details on other valid values.

This option is typically activated to create an “Enter” (or “Splash”) page for your shop; in this case it is used in conjunction with x ic home to display an image or slide show that links to the shop Products page, e.g. http://myshop.bigcartel/products

Restoring Your Home Page Content

If you wish to restore your original home page content simply delete any relevant IC pages (e.g. x ic before home, x ic home or x ic after home) you have created.

If you edited your Home page menu links, you may also need to revisit your menu labels as detailed by How should I assign the Home, Site and View All links in my menus?