05 Configure
Building your home page
Which sections to use, in what order, and what each one needs before it will show anything.
Every Curio section can go on any page — home, product, collection, blog, or a regular page. This page is about the home page, because it is the one you build from nothing.
Open Customize on the Curio theme. The left column lists your sections; Add section adds one; drag the handles to reorder. Each section carries its own Color scheme setting, so alternating between scheme 1 and scheme 3 is how you give a long page rhythm.
An arrangement that works#
For a resale store with a stocked catalog, this order answers a first-time visitor’s questions in the order they ask them: what is this, what have you got, can I trust the condition, who are you.
| # | Section | Why here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stock hero | One headline, a plate image, and three or four fact rows. Says what you deal in. |
| 2 | Featured collection | Fresh stock, as a contact sheet of numbered lots. The reason people came. |
| 3 | Register | The same stock as a shoppable ledger table. Different shoppers scan differently. |
| 4 | Grading system | Your condition scale, published. The trust centerpiece. |
| 5 | Provenance story or Manifest | Who you are, or how selling to you works. |
| 6 | Sold archive | Proof that things sell. Skip until you have a real archive. |
| 7 | Questions | Sizing, shipping, returns on one-of-one items. |
| 8 | Journal | If you write. Cut it if you do not. |
Six to eight sections is a good home page. Twelve is a slow one — every section is more to load and more to scroll past.
Start from the preset#
A fresh install of Curio already has a home page arranged roughly like the above, with placeholder copy. Working through it top to bottom and replacing the placeholders is faster than starting empty, and it shows you what each section looks like when it is fed.
Delete rather than hide. An empty section you left in place still costs load time. If you are not going to use the lookbook, remove it.
Sections that need data first#
Several sections have nothing to draw until you point them at something. They will look broken in the editor and simply not render on the storefront.
| Section | Needs |
|---|---|
| Featured collection, Register, Sold archive | A collection selected |
| Journal | A blog selected |
| Ledger index | A collection list selected |
| Countdown | An end date, formatted 2026-12-31 18:00 |
| Lookbook | An image, plus hotspot blocks |
| Before and after | Both images |
| Slideshow, Promo tiles, Press coverage, Trust badges, Questions | At least one block |
| Recently viewed | Nothing — it stays empty until a visitor has viewed something |
Placeholder copy is the number one launch bug#
Curio ships defaults in section text fields so the editor is not a wall of empty boxes. They are prompts, not copy. Before you publish, search your home page for anything that reads like an instruction — “Add a label”, “Describe what buyers can expect from this grade” — and either write it or delete the block.
The grading system section is the usual culprit: it ships with grades A through D and the definition “Describe what buyers can expect from this grade.” Those are your words to write.
The header, footer, and announcement bar#
These three are not part of the sections list you drag around. They sit in the Header and Footer groups at the top and bottom of the editor’s left column and appear on every page.
- Announcement bar — up to 8 announcements, each with an optional link. It also has an archive ticker: pick a collection and it appends a live count of its products, such as “214 objects cataloged”. That count is real; there is no way to type a fake one.
- Header — your menu, the sticky masthead switch, the mega menu switch, predictive search, the cart chip, localization selectors, and up to 12 in-menu promo blocks. A promo block targets one top-level menu item by name and appears inside its mega menu.
- Footer — up to 12 blocks in three kinds: menu, text, and newsletter. Plus payment icons, social icons, and the country and language selectors.
The age verifier and promo popup also live in the footer group. Both ship off.
Other templates#
The same section list is available on every template, and each has its own arrangement:
- Product — see the product page.
- Collection and Search — see collections and search.
- Page — a good home for the manifest, grading system, or questions sections above the page content.
- Contact page — Curio ships a
page.contacttemplate with the contact form styled as an intake card. Create a page in Content → Pages and pick the contact template. - 404 — the not-found template takes sections too. A featured collection there recovers a dead link into a browse.