So you’ve installed WordPress and plan to use it for your small business website. Now what?
The first step to making your website look like a website for your business instead of a blog is to create a static front page and configure WordPress to use this as your home page.
Normally, when someone visits your WordPress website they will see a list of your latest blog posts. If you are using this for your business website, that may not be what you want on your home page.
Luckily, this is easy to change. Don’t worry, you can still have a page that lists all your blog posts too, if you want to have blog entries or articles on your website.
Create a Static Home Page in WordPress – Step By Step:
After you log into your WordPress Admin, create two WordPress pages.
1) Go to Write -> Page. Name the page ‘Home’ and Publish it.
I also like to turn off Comments and Pings in the settings at the bottom of this page before publishing it.
2) Go to Write -> Page one more time. Name this page ‘Blog’ and Publish it.
3) Now go to Settings -> Reading in your WordPress Admin panel.
4) Change the “Front page displays:” settings to look like this:
A Video Walkthrough
Here is a short video from WordPress.org that walks through these steps:
The End Result – More Like a Website Than a Blog
Once you save these settings with the button at the bottom of the page, you’ll see the page called “Home” as the main page of your blog. You can edit this page to have anything you want in it. You’ll also notice there is a page on the site called ‘Blog’ that shows your blog posts still.
That’s all there is to it! Now you have a custom web page for your website, and you can still link to your blog posts if you want to.
Further Customize Your Home Page With Page Templates
The only problem with the screen above, is that the page title (Home in this case) and the Sidebar still show up on your website. You can remove those also, but you’ll need to create a WordPress ‘custom page template’ to do that. It’s not hard – read this article to see how: How to Create a Custom Page Template in WordPress.
See an Example WordPress Website
If you want to see an example of a complete small business website in WordPress with a customized home page, take a look at the Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme. Click here to watch the video!
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Thanks for the tutorial. Very helpful.
Having a problem thou. This problem does not occur if I use wordpress.com for the site. But when installing wordpress on a host, I get two Home buttons on the menu.
Pages only has one Home page. Weird. Ever seen this before?
Also on the Worpress.com site I can put the menu at the top of the page. Using the same theme on the hosted site, it says the theme does not support menus, so I have to put it on the sidebar.
@Randy – that is strange. What theme are you using on the self-hosted site?
Don,
Using Notepad Theme by Nick La
It appears the Theme has quite a few quirks.
I’m not a PHP programmer. But was able to figure it out.
I found if I remove this code from the Theme, then the other Home button goes away:
<li><a href="”>Home
I also changed some other code that was causing the menu to truncate if more than 5 items.
This website is being built for a church website. The pastor loves the theme, which looks like a yellow ruled notepad. I think it’s ugly, and the theme is very limiting, but it is his choice.
Thanks for your response. If you are on Linkedin, send me an invite.
Hi Mr. Campbell,
Thanks for the article.
I created a page template called nosidebar.php which was an exact copy of a page.php file inside the theme minus the “get sidebar” command (for lack of a better term) and including the code to have it show up as a template inside wordpress dashboard.
It seems as though I messed up something, although it was working originally I think.
See, when I would create a page (contact page for example), I went to wordpress, created page with forms and such etc (inside wordpress) and chose the template with no sidebar.
After watching your video it looks to me like I have to make a template for every page I want to be without the sidebar AND I have to create the html etc. for that template outside of wordpress. Am I right?
If so this is bad for me being a novice. What other options do you know of that could help someone who doesn’t want to design the page content outside wordpress but get rid of the sidebar and title on a page?
Thanks for your time,
Scott
Hi Scott,
No, you only need to create one “no-sidebar” page template. You then select that page template on any page you create in WordPress where you don’t want the sidebars to appear.
Also, if you create it like I show in this video: A custom page template you can update
You can use the WordPress editor to create your content for any page that uses that page template.
Okay I think I did this. Everything looks okat until I actually click on a post page then it is broken. I created the template with Artisteer and must have broken something. Would you want to look at the site?
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