Having a homepage is optional, but it's a powerful feature. It's the default page your visitors will come across. An homepage is sometimes referred to as a landing page, a splash page, as a static page or as a lead page.

Structure

A homepage is the best way to focus the user's experience and guide your visitors into a specific part of your website, which is managed by Ghost. Its design can be totally different than the pages managed by Ghost. Two examples:

Your domain structure could look like this:

pascalandy.com/ (custom homepage)
pascalandy.com/blog/ (ghost)

Another way of seeing it is to say :

• the homepage (pascalandy.com) lives under root /
• the /blog lives under a subdirectory

Or, if you prefer, you could set up your domain this way as well:

juliaburns.com/ (custom homepage)
blog.juliaburns.com/ (ghost)

You are the designer

You have to be aware that you are responsible to design your custom homepage (HTML, CSS, JS). As the owner of your website, you can use any static page you want. You could download this landing page, tweak it and host it in front of your Ghost website. FirePress is not a website builder after all.

In the future, we might offer templates that are easy to customize, but we can't provide a timeline at the moment.

Pricing

The cost of hosting a custom homepage is only 90$ per year.

You must have an active plan for Ghost with us prior to adding a homepage in front of your Ghost's website. If you only want a homepage on FirePress, we will charge you the same price as our Ghost yearly plan.

Don't hesitate to contact us for more details.

How does it work?

You have two options:

1. Using Git
2. Send us a zip file

1. Workflow option using Git

We assume you can do basic git commits in a GitHub repo. All the configurations are fully managed by FirePress.

Here is what you get when you sign-up for our homepage plan:

• FirePress will create a new private repo. This is where you will host the code for your homepage.
• The URL will look like https://github.com/firepress-org/[YOUR_SITE]
• Send us a quick email (at [email protected]) and tell us which email you are using on GitHub. We will add you to this git repo.
• From now on, you will work on this repo to do any updates on your homepage.
• Every commits made on the master branch will be deployed on your homepage thank to the CI/CD. This means that on every commits, the system will push your code the your website.
• You will see all the details on each builds! Check this out as an example: https://github.com/firepress-org/ghostfire/actions/workflows/build.yml
• Updates are applied to your homepage

Rules we must agree with:

• Your homepage's code (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS) must be under the /public directory.
• Your homepage file must be named /index.html directory.
• Don't update/modify/delete branch edge because it's reserved to FirePress folks.
• Yes, you can invite other people like freelancers. Send us a quick email (at [email protected]) and tell us which email this person is using on GitHub. We will add him/her to this git repo.
• On this plan, we host pure HTML/CSS/JS sites. If your site needs a specific framework like NodeJS or PHP, please contact us.

Best practice:

You should work on a "dev" branch while you code. Merge to master only when your code is production-ready.

2. Workflow option using a Zip file

If you simply want to send us a zip file once in a while, it's fine too :-p

Staging site

You might consider having a staging site at your disposal. For example, you can commit to branch staging and see the results of your work at stg.example.com

A) For which instance(s) do you need a staging site?

• Your homepage and/or your Ghost instance?

B) Which domain URL structure do you want?

In Production, you could have something like:

• example.com/ (homepage prod)
• example.com/news/ (Ghost prod)

In Staging, you could have something like:

• stg.example.com/ (Homepage staging)
• stg.example.com/news/(Ghost staging)

Regarding pricing, we will simply add more plans (homepage, Ghost) for each staging site required.