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".