Creating a Welcome/Portal Page for WP Blog

[Reed]

Hi,
I want to create a landing page for my blog which will be completely different from my blog.
For Example Here

http://esportscommunity.in/ The Welcome/Portal/ or Landing page is completely different from the forum.

I want to do the same with my blog. A Welcome page with different theme and customization so I can put up updated regarding my blog and forum on it.

I already gooogled about it a little and apparently their are 2 easy options
1) Use Welcome Plugin and create a splash screen, but I don't think it will serve as a welcome page.
2)Create a static page by making 2 pages in wordpress and putting content in one of them, but I don't wanna do that since it will not have different template and layout.

Please help my by suggesting what else can be done.

 

[deliteblogger]

http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Page_Templates

Individual Pages can be set to use a specific custom Page Template (a WordPress Theme PHP template file, e.g., snarfer.php) you create within your Theme. See Creating your own Page Templates below on how to create a custom template file for a Page.