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WordPress Static Home Page

Bob — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:17:07 +0000

We get a lot of questions about using a static homepage with a WordPress Website. Here’s all you have to do. First make a page called Home or Welcome. Insert the content you want into your page, pictures, whatever you want. Then save it or publish it. Next create another page called Blog or News and save that also. Now go to the Settings section of your WordPress Dashboard and click on Reading.

There you will find an area labeled “Front page displays”. Select “A Static Page” and then using the drop down selections choose Home or Welcome as your Home Page and Blog or News as your Posts Page. Now your Home Page will be the static page you chose rather than the blog. Your blog will now come up as your newly saved Blog or News page. You now have a static Home page that people will land on when going to your domain and you still have the ability to post news and announcements or a blog.

You can take it even farther by creating a slide show at the top of your page which will give your new home page a more custom look. A simple way to do this is to install the NexGen Gallery plugin along with the NexGen Smooth Gallery plugin. Create a gallery of photos or graphics in the NexGen Gallery and then use the Smooth gallery to display them at the top of your home page. Here’s an example.

You can even go farther with a custom page template and even add something like the Featured Content Gallery plugin that will also give you a slide show but it’s images are linked to specific posts or a category.

WordPress is NOT just Blog Software it is a website engine with many built in features and even more add on features. It can be used for many different type of websites. We would be glad to help you with yours. Contact Us!

Static Pages in your WordPress Site

Bob — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:15:41 +0000

There are many different ways you can set WordPress up to display the content you have, the way you want it seen. Using WordPress you display your website content as “pages” and “posts”.

Pages contain information that you want displayed on your site such as an “About Us” page and “Contact Info”. Any other standard information, photo galleries, contact forms, or event listings can be a fixed page on your website. Pages are displayed on a menu bar or in your sidebar.

Posts are your news articles, announcements or blog posts. Posts can be assigned catagories and tags so they can be displayed in a sorted fashion. Posts are what normally get displayed on the home page but you can set your WordPress site up to have a fixed page as your home page and a seperate page to display your news or blog.

We’ve included a video we found on YouTube that gets into WordPress Pages and thought we’d post it here. Click the article title above to view the post page with the video. We also have another article on this subject we posted a ways back that you might want to also check out.

When you use WordPress or when we build you a site with WordPress you have many options!

Add Single Post Templates To WP

Bob — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:37:54 +0000

When you create a website or blog you want your visitors to get a variety of information. It’s always much nicer to have a few different styles to your pages and posts so you don’t bore people with the same look everywhere they go. This has always been possible with WordPress pages, where all you do is make a copy of your page.php file, rename it, add a little code to the top, upload it to the theme folder, and then when you create pages you get to select the page template you want to use. So by also copying your sidebar files and renaming those and also uploading them to the theme folder you can now call your different sidebars from your different templates. In your new sidebars you can code in different ads or widgets giving that page a different look to it. If you know what you are doing with the code you can also make page templates that display your page differently altogether like maybe full width and no sidebars at all.

Now you can do the same thing with your posts. Using the plugin called the “Single Post Template Plugin” , by Nathen Rice, you can do the exact same thing with your posts or articles. With this you copy the single.php file and insert the template code at the top just like in a page template. You can do the different sidebar thing or code in different ads to the top or bottom of your new templates. Just like a Page, when you edit or create a Post, you have a drop down to select the the post template you want to use.

This pluging does require a little extra work but it adds a nice touch to your blog or website and gives it additional functionality to set it apart from the rest.

Nathen Rice has some other nice plugins too and you can check them all out at http://www.nathanrice.net/plugins/