If you’re new to WordPress and you’re trying to figure out how to set up your home page to static content or how to make your blog appear on a different page on your website – here’s the video to explain the steps.
Video Transcript Provided by Mally LaPete
Hi, y’all. Welcome to another wonderful WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton here in San Antonio, Texas [USA].
Today, for WordPress Wednesday, we’re going to walk through — actually, we’re going to go back — go back to the total basics.
How to set up your home page with static content. And, how to say where you want your Blog articles to appear inside your website. It’s a simple thing, but if nobody has ever showed you, it can get very confusing.
Before I get started, you know what I have to do. I’ve got to give a shout out to our amazing sponsors and partners in crime. And helping you with the WordPress world.
WPEngine has incredible hosting. They have staging sites for you so, if you want to tinker and play around with your website and don’t want to mess up what the live version looks like, you can get a staging site with their incredible hosting service. Check them out.
We also have WPElevation. If you’re an entrepreneur using WordPress or it you’re a small business owner or a freelancer, for that matter, using WordPress to make a living, you need to check their Tracks. Troy is an incredible guy. He’s from Australia. He’s got a great accent that’s fun to listen to (and not bad to look at either).
And WP101. Another great company doing amazing WordPress videos. He slows down. He doesn’t talk nearly as quickly as I do. He gives you step by step, beautiful, clear instructions on how to use WordPress better. They have free videos as well as a wonderful paid environment that you can get into and really find some dynamic cool videos.
Let’s talk about setting up your home page. How do you do it? By default (let’s go back for a second). By default, WordPress thinks that you want to use your website for a blog. And that’s not always the case. Sometimes you want to have a Blog inside of it, but it would be nice to go ahead and maybe have a welcome paragraph or something on the home page that folks can read that’s more static.
And then maybe you want them to click somewhere else to get to your blog area, right? How do we do that? I’m going to walk you through where those settings are inside of WordPress.
You’re going to log into your dashboard. On the left side of your navigation over here you’ve got an area called Settings. You go into [the subheading] Reading.
You’ve got an option right up here. It’s basically asking -What do you want to display on your front page of your Website? -By default, this option is typically selected (Your latest posts).
So, again, it thinks again that you want to use this Website for a blog. By default, when I go to my homepage on WPWD.com (WordPress Wednesday.com), we have all of our posts— all of our helpful tutorial videos— sitting here. But if I just want a static bit of information to sit there— maybe a welcome area— I can actually click this option [A static page (select below)] and then these two selections [Front page: and Posts page:] become available for me.
I can open this up and I can choose Home Page [from the drop down menu]. Now, you would have already had to make that page. And I have already made a Home Page. I just put one line of content just specifically for this tutorial.
If I select Home Page, I can go ahead and click Save Changes. Now, when I go back to the front side of my website and click Refresh, WordPress knows to not display all of my posts (those are gone). Now it just displays whatever I have inside of that page.
When I go to [Pages] All Pages, you can see in my Home Page here that I only have [the phrase] “all of our content.” [laughing] That’s the one line I have sitting there and, of course, that’s visible here.
You could obviously put anything you want into this space. Fill it up. Put some images. Put a video, if you wanted to. Whatever you wanted, and click Publish or Update and now this could be your Home Page content.
The other thing that some authors might give you an option for to designate what your Home Page is, is actually sitting inside this Home Page area. So, if doing what I just told you does NOT work, you have two other potential options. You can come into your Home Page area like this [Pages, All Pages, Home Page] and check and see if the author has given you some sort of a Template option over here [right side of screen] that might have a drop down option that says Home Page. That’s the way the author has designated you to set your content on your Home Page.
The second option that I wanted to remind you of is look at the documentation. Every Theme out there, especially with a premium Theme that you have purchased, should have incredible documentation from the author. Inside that Zip file that you originally downloaded– dive back in there, open it up, and see if you can find anything in there that says Documentation, How Tos, Read me First. Click on that and you should be able to find a step-by-step instructional guide on how to set up, install, set up, import demo content (maybe), how to use their shortcode system.
Some authors give you so much love in there it’s incredible. They really walk you through everything in there step-by-step. That’s how you would set up your Home Page to static content.
What if I wanted a page now in my Menu. Let’s say up at the top up here. What if I wanted up here at the top of my Menu area to have a link that says Blog? I don’t want it on my Home Page but I do want it accessible. You come in here [Pages] and click Add New and we would simply just create a page called Blog or Resources or whatever you would want that to be. And then you just click Publish [on the right of screen].
You wouldn’t put anything inside here [pointing to the empty content area]. Just go ahead and click Publish. And now we have a [Blog] page designated for the articles to dynamically display.
There’s one more step. You still have to go into Settings. Go back to Reading. And, see this? It says Posts page: Now, because I’ve already made that page, I can choose Blog and click Save [Changes]. But, that’s still not up on my main Menu. I’ve got to go add that. So, I’ve got to go into Appearance. Go to Menus. Be sure I’m on the correct Menu which is my Main (Primary Menu) at the top of my website.
So, now I’ve got my Blog page over here. I can click Add to Menu. And maybe I want that to be my second option so I drag and drop it. And click Save Menu. Now when I go back to the front side of my website and click Refresh, my second option should be Blog. When I click on there, all of my Posts should dynamically display. Just like they originally did on my Home Page. How groovy cool is that?
And, of course, inside of that Settings, Reading area you can kind of designate do you want it to be full text, meaning do you want the entire article to display on that really long page, or do you want maybe just a snippet or summary that offers the Read More option where they can click in and go to the actual Post article and read the whole darn thing over there, right?
You can also designate how many you want to display on one page at a time. If you’re doing like what I’m doing with our Blog posts I could potentially say I want 20 because I really don’t write text, I just have videos sitting there. It would be incredible to have a lot of videos on one page. I typically leave this [Blog pages show at most] at 10. And, as you all saw earlier, I always have my posts on my Home Page.
I’m going to set everything back [to the way it was] here. Click Save Changes. I’ll go through and take that off the menu. I hope that helped you all.
If you all have questions about your WordPress website, would you consider putting them in the description box below or Tweet us. That’s always an option. I’ll put our Twitter handle in the description box below. We’ll catch you all next WordPress Wednesday. Thank so much. Bye bye, y’all.
