Anyway the homepage has been deployed as a custom content type which is deployed via solution/feature framework.  I do plan to document what we did on here at some point.

Whilst this deploys beautifully we had to make a couple of tweaks to the layout after deployment and this brought a problem.

We’d update the master page layout template but the homepage would not update! So after a bit of playing about we realised that the page was not properly connected to the master page layout.

Using SharePoint Designer, I opened up the site, browsed the sites /Pages document library. Found the offending page, right-clicked on the page disconnected it from its page layout. A warning appeared and clicked Yes. SharePoint Designer worked away and then another right-click and reconnected it to the page layout.

Switching back to the Home page and refreshing the page revealed that it was now working correctly and the master page layout changes were now reflected onto the home page, job done!