I am building in Joomla! version 3.3.6 for my first time. I have built a ton of custom Wordpress in the past. The first challenge I have encoutnered, is the requirement of building a page which does not look anything like the template pages. The client desires a landing splash page, with large images and a gradient background. However, they are using a template already. Now, I know that I shouldn't start my research on Stack Overflow, so I've watched hours of tutorials for beginners on Lynda.com. No one seems to be covering this topic. Any help would be really appreciated.
To explain this idea, I will compare to what I would do in Wordpress. I would create a file named "page-splash.php" and give it a template name: Splash. Then I would fill this page with my choice code. Finally I would create a "Page" object in wp backend and give it the "template" of "splash".
This is very possible and often accomplished in Joomla.
You would simply need a second template installed and assigned to the page. In Joomla, you could technically have a different template installed for every single page if you wanted to. But in this case, you just need a 2nd template.
Start by building a bare bones template, as found here: https://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_basic_Joomla!_template (or copy the current template from /templates/ directory and update the templateDetails.xml file so it will install as a second template)
Install 2nd template via Extension Manager
Next, make sure your new page is linked within the Menu Manager (as you will need a menu assignment to call the new template in next step)
Go to Template Manager and you can assign your new template to the menu item defined in the previous step.
You now have 2 independent templates running on the same installation and they can be styled and configured independent of one another.
Assigning more than one template is such a common task in Joomla that you can find more details about this in the official documentation: https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Switching_templates
Joomla is by Default not a Blog/Template layout cms, but rather a web application builder.
You can get extensions to create custom templates that make Joomla function like a blog application such as ZOO or K2. I would not go the route of creating individual templates for each page as it would be similar to installing a different theme for each page on a WordPress site.
