As a business you usually want to greet your visitors with a proper front page, and not send them straight into your blog. This little tutorial will show you how, and it will even work if you want to skip the blog thing all together.
Step 1
You will need to create two new pages, one that will become the new front page and one that will be a holding page for your blog. By holding page I mean this page will only serve to give your blog a position in the menu and a url, it’s content will not be displayed.
- Create a new page (this will become your front page).
- Do not spend any time on this page’s permalink.
- Fill with what you want on your front page.
- Choose a template that will look good as a front page (usually one without a sidebar).
- Leave the title field empty if you do not want a heading on your front page.
- Create another page (this will become a holding page for your blog).
- Make sure the permalink for this page is something useful like/blog or/news.
- Give it a title.
- Do not give it any content as this will not be displayed.
- Skip this if you do not want a blog.
Step 2
In this step you let WordPress know which page you want to use as the front page and which page you want to use as a holding page for your blog.
- In your WP Admin navigate to Settings -> Reading
- Select Front page displays a static page.
- Select your newly created front page as the option for Front page.
- If you left the title field blank you choose the blank option, otherwise you choose the title of your front page.
- Select your newly created holding page as option for Posts page.
- Select the option with the title of your new holding page.
- Skip this if you do not want a blog.
- Remember to Save Changes.
Step 3
Rejoice, you now have a proper homepage; not just a blog.
Let me know if you found this useful and please ask questions in the comments if something is unclear!
The first version of this blog post was published in July 2012, so this is a 2 year anniversary update 😀
Smart!
Hm, I have to learn how to make a WordPress page altogether, but anyway, this seems like a good idea 🙂
Btw: Is it possible to change wordpress so that it shows the blog as the home page, but only summaries instead of the whole posts?
Some themes uses the «excerpts» field to solve this, but the usual way to get shorter texts on the blog page is to use the more tag.
What is above the more tag will be on the blog page, and then the vistor has to click «read more» to get to see what is underneith the more tag. Example can be seen on my blog page.
To add a more tag use the button than is to the right of the link-buttons in the visual editor, or the button that says «more» in the html editor. Or just manually add in the html editor.
Thanks! That worked like a charm. Check out http://steinaldermannen.no/ now! I also figured out how to make the rss feed contain summaries instead of the whole articles (in the settings – reader section)
I, personally, hate it when there are only summaries in the RSS. This means the whole post will not show up in my Flipboard app. I use Flipboard to keep up to date on the blogs I follow. But I understand why people do it…
Hey, Benedicte. I´ll keep this in mind – thanx for blogging about it. Nice web-page by the way:)