Setting up a website Landing Page with multiple stores

Question

I need to setup a Magento website landing page that contains two stores. The landing page should use the same footer and header as the child stores. The website landing page essentially directs the user to the two child stores.

Our basic structure:

URL to landing page: www.website.com

URL to store 1 page: www.website.com/store1

URL to store 2 page: www.website.com/store2

Each store has its own store home landing page, so there needs to be something before that that is a general landing page for both stores.

I need the www.website.com landing page to be able to use the same (or similar) footer and header, be able to pull up the store names, and use things like static blocks.

Can anyone point me into the right direction?

Answer 1

I think this is the basic functionality of a Magento multi-store, right?

http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/overview-how-multiple-websites-stores-work/

You can make domain.com your default store's homepage and then just have two sub-stores with individual CMS pages as your /store1 and /store2

I assume you don't even have the multi-store set up, so I suggest watching those two videos and configuring that locally first.

Answer 2

I did this unified front page with call to all stores in custom blocks on a home page layout by creating a website with no products. I have set up the design so that I just pulled a home page layout that had call to each store as needed. This way I could have a base store with nothing in it that just simplified the overhead and let the client make there changes with out issue. Worked well and is a simple task to do. NOTE: we do about 5 websites (store1.domain.tld,store2.domain.tld,store3.domain.tld,etc) and why there was a productless website used.