Information Sells

WordPress is a very powerful, highly customizable tool. The folks behind the scenes and the thousands of active developers are very responsive to the needs and requests of ordinary users.

But WordPress suffers from one weakness endemic to the Open Source community: there are no easy to understand instructions.

Very little about PHP is intuitive. Many difficult to understand commands, operations, and even menus in the WordPress Admin panel are made worse by bad designs and an interface that sometimes goes beyond minimal all the way to non-existent.

The soon to be released WordPress v2.7 will address some – but not all – of these problems.

In the meantime – here’s a hidden in plain sight, secret answer to a frequently asked question that can take hours of Googling to discover:

Yes you can have both a traditional home page and a blog with WordPress.

You can quickly give your blog a static front page without writing a line of code. You just click on “Settings | Reading Settings | Front page displays” and then choose “A Static page.”

Hidden In Plain Sight

That’s the easy part.

But most bloggers don’t want a home page that leads nowhere. We want a home page that serves as an introduction to the blog.

A BLOG AND A WEB SITE ALL IN ONE PACKAGE

When you click on the “A Static Page” link, a drop down menu shows all your pages. You pick the one you want to use as your front page. Nothing complicated or difficult there – you create a home page with a single mouse click.

But how do your readers find the blog after landing on this static page?

When you click on the “Posts Page” menu – you once again see all your Pages. That can’t be right, can it?

In fact – it is “right” – but it is also dangerous. If you click on a page and click Update, your page’s content will be replaced by your recent blog posts.

Here’s what you really want to do:

1. Create a new page. Name it Blog. Do not write anything but the title. Leave the page blank – just title it and click Publish.
2. Go to “Settings | Reading Settings | Front page displays”
3. Click the Static page radio button
4. In the “Front page” dialog, select your home page
5. In the “Posts page” dialog, select “Blog” (Your newly created, blank page)
6. Click Update.

Now check your blog. If your theme displays links to other pages, as most themes do, there will be a new page called “Blog.” When you click on it, you’ll see the traditional WordPress Blog.

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Tags: home page, wordpress