Adding a splash page on home

I built a splash page that does not utilize any of the templating for the theme.

It is a full bleed image, with text that brings you into the site.

My original thought was to create a custom page template calling only the image from the page. However, I could not make it work. The css kept breaking or the page didn’t come in at all.

After that, I tried pasting the entire contents into the splash template. That didn’t work. I tried pasting the entire contents into the splash page leaving the template blank. That also didn’t work.

I finally resorted to a flat HTML file using an .htacess rule to direct it. Everything was fine except now the “home” page is outside of WordPress.

It created another problem with search. Search parameters are based on the home page. I tried a few ways to redirect this and finally resorted to a full url in the searchform.php file. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to search the entire site and limits it to one category.

So what would I like to do?

Ideally I would like to find a rock solid way to get that index.html file into WordPress with a working loop to be able to change the media attachment.

If that doesn’t work, I would like a solution to make search work sitewide. Right now, I have it set to /blog.

The site is https://www.arielshallit.com/

Any help (code) you can bring to the table would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.