Display a view in my frontpage I would like to display a view in one part of my page by code but i cannot figure it out why it doesn't work

In page.tpl.php i called the next function:

views_embed_view('name_of_view');


If i assigned it to a variable and execute this:

print render($x);

Then i get the html code of the view. Actually I would like to customize the view also. How could i do it ?
print views_embed_view('name_of_view','defaults');


no need of rendering also a second arguments are there  as display name

views_embed_view()


  Embed a view using a PHP snippet.
  
  This function is meant to be called from PHP snippets, should one wish
  to embed a view in a node or something. It's meant to provide the
  simplest solution and doesn't really offer a lot of options, but
  breaking the function apart is pretty easy, and this provides a
  worthwhile guide to doing so.