Creating a Home Page Template The index page of a site I am building is to be a video and nothing else which clicks through to the site.

I have read about page templates and seen some modules called 'front page' but I would like to to do this within the code.

Is there a best advised / standard way to do this?

I have tried setting an if statement for $front_page but this seems to happen for every page.
The variable you wish to test is $is_front, which is only true for the front page.

You can find a list of the variable available for page.tpl.php here.