This actually did not help. The point is to have the ‘home’ page with a completely different look than the blog. My front page for example must not have any header or footer, different background, colors, fonts… everything.

Anyway, using MAMP and doing all tricks possible (including hacking the php code of WP) I somehow managed to register a site named ‘blog’ and it was actually a separate site from my ‘main site’ – all worked good.

I tried to repeat these steps on a live site, and it actually didn’t work. That is, I was able to register a ‘blog’ site, but anything I uploaded to it, showed up on the ‘main site’ as well. I guess this is trickier than I thought.

For the moment I keep 2 WP installations – one under the main domain, and another one in the folder ‘/blog’ – but it’s kind of ugly setup.

If you want a different look on your homepage, you merely need to make a “Page” and give that a special template (e.g. with no header, etc.). Then select that Page to be your homepage.

Your homepage can be any Page you select. You just need to look into “page templates” or get a theme that has a page template design you like.

The following solution used to work, but I don’t know if it does anymore (someone in the comments said this plugin isn’t being updated anymore):http://wpmu.org/wordpress-different-theme-per-page-post/

If you’re looking for a landing page as your homepage, you can also look into landing page plugins.