Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-1155275-20160202135905/@comment-4142476-20160202155823

One reason I would personally support the idea of what I'd call front page templates, is so that on the one hand, randoms can't just "blank" or vandalize the front page (if it's protected), but you can still point a well-meaning editor to the appropriate template even if they're a beginner at editing.

A lot of the time after all, the front page relies partially on auto-generated content (twitter and blogs feeds, randomized quotes, ...) and partially on static content like the welcome message ("Welcome to ___. We have __ pages") and navigations to important pages. The only part that needs manual editing is featured articles/images modules (mostly done by an admin or through community selection), spelling mistakes and adding interlanguage links.

Overall though, I would say it is indeed advised to use templates that are applied to multiple pages.