Syfter -

So, today I had a problem.  I needed a splash page for a site I was working on to display instead of the main page for the site.  In addition, that page needed to “look” different from the rest of the site.  I didn’t want the normal menu and links in the footer to show on the splash page.  This was my solution:

I created a custom header.php in my themes root directory.  My header.php looks like this:

<?php

if (is_page('splash')){

include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/header-splash.php');

} else {

include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/header-site.php');

}

?>

Then I copied my original header into the file header-site.php and made a separate header file called header-splash.php for my splash page.  In the header-splash.php file, I removed the menu and content that I did not want on my splash page that the original header.php file was rendering.
I followed the exact same process as above for the footer.php file. After this was complete, I created a page template by copying the page.php contents into a new file calling it page-splash.php and making it a template page by putting this at the top:

<?php

/*

Template Name: Splash Page

*/

?>

Then, I created a new page (my splash page using that template and in WordPress I set the home page (Settings | Reading) to the new splash page I created. I also had to go in and modify the menu so the home link pointed to the new main page (in my case ?post=1). Hope this helps.!