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 Pages -> Add New. Name the page ‘Welcome’ and Publish it. (Note: Do NOT name it ‘Home’)
I also like to turn off Comments and Pings in the settings at the bottom of this page before publishing it.
2) Go to Pages -> Add New 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 “Welcome” 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 (Welcome 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.
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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?
Hey Don, just came across your post when I had a similar problem to Randy. Evidently this is a common occurrence – judging by how many solutions have been posted across the internet.
This frequently occurs when someone wants their wordpress.org blog to be a static-page website (which I do 99.9% of the time), and gets confused because there is already one blog post showing as the ‘home’ page.
It can also depend on the Theme being used, for example the one I’m using today needs the Blog to be the main page so the Slider will work – but the slider can be set to be PAGES rather than POSTS. Easy to see why folks can get confused
Now if only this little tidbit had’ve been mentioned on the Support page for the Theme, it could have saved me a lot of time …
Thanks for the great tips, Don, as always.
Cheers
Teena!
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?
Thanks for your insight. About a year ago I started the process and feel good about what I have developed.
Hi – I’m having difficulty getting rid of the one of the “Home” links. One is definitely a page as you described above. The other seems to be a recent post, although I deleted the posts. When I originally did this in the Twenty-Ten theme, I didn’t have the 2 “home” buttons. I then changed the theme to Connections and the 2nd home button appeared. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
@Scott – you should – that’s a nice site you’ve built!
@Ruth – this depends on the theme you are using (as you saw when you switched themes from 2010 to Connections.) I’m not familiar with the Connections theme, but you may want to change the name of your new Home page to see if that makes a difference. I’ve seen some themes hard code the Home page.
Hello Don,
I needed to know if a website host is necessary for your wordpress blog/website. Thanks for the help.
Hi Ella,
Yes, you will need hosting. It’s pretty inexpensive – my favorite host for setting up WordPress sites is BlueHost, and they are only about $6.95/mo.
Thank you for the simple guide!
I am left with one problem… the bottom of the page.
Is it possible to remove the footer and the “Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Elegant Grunge by Michael Tyson.” etc..?
@Jake – you bet!
If you are using WordPress.com for your site then you will not be able to remove that info from the footer. You could do that if you were self-hosting your WordPress site though.
Don:
I am editing my content in visual i.e. home page. I have gone to pages/edit. What I cannot do is change font size and I can only get double spacing as I type text. One, can I change font size back and forth. Two, how do I get single spacing?
Hi Bruce,
You should get single spacing in the WordPress editor by default, unless you type the “Return” key then it treats it like a paragraph. Just let the text wrap and only use the Return key when you want a paragraph break.
For font-size, you’ll have to change a little css, email support@expand2web.com and I’ll give you an example.
after getting frustrated with go daddy’s web designer, i switched to wordpress, i just want a simple clean website, not a blog, i have to launch through go daddy, they host it, can you recomend a simple theme for me to star with, twenty ten looks nice but there’s all this blog stuff i don’t need
Hi Bob,
Most of the WordPress themes out there are set up to look like a blog by default. I have a theme specifically designed for Small Business websites that sets a home page for you that does not look like a blog. Take a look and see if that would help you get started faster.
ok – i’m actually getting somewhere with wordpress now and I like it – is it true that if i eliminate the sidebar on every page I won’t be able to get in and change my content? I left a blog page at the end with a sidebar just in case – my version is a little different than your tutorial and I had the sanme trouble your other reader did finding write – have to go to PAGES first – I would like to add images but they come in like a link that you have to double click
Bob,
You can always get into your WordPress Dashboard by going to: yourdomain.com/wp-login.php
great thank you !
I must be doing something wrong as I cannot for the life of me find ‘write” Am I maybe using the wrong version of wordpress?
Hi Erica,
When logged in to your WordPress Dashboard, go to Pages first, then Write.
I’ve also been trying to see the “write” menu, with no luck. I’m using twenty-eleven at the moment. Thanks. (I hope I can embed this, but I’ll send the link to the screen shot just in case)
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/gBBzc4a1cG5aPAOlHRl7ZA?feat=directlink
From Hyams
Hi Don,
This tutorial helped a lot, thanks!. I have some doubts to get cleared though. I have setup wordpress to run on localhost. When I login as admin, click on pages, theres one page “About”, but when i view this site in preview, there is a “Home” page and an”About” page. I could not find where i can make changes to this “Home” page in admin. And how to re arrange the pages.
Look forward to your reply.
Thanks
Hi Puvi,
What WordPress Theme are you using? Can you give me a link to your site so I can see it?
Hello. Here’s a question. I believe Google treats blogs and non-blog websites differently. Does Google treat a WP CMS site with secondary blog differently from a primary blog with secondary CMS? In fact does Google treat all WP sites as blogs? This of course shows my very confused thinking about the mechanics of the internet in general!!
Hi Susannah,
Google doesn’t really care if it is looking at a website or blog. To the Google crawler, it just sees web page. Blogs (and websites with blogs) tend to do better in the search results because people can update them easier and more frequently, and Google likes fresh, original content.
Thanks for that Don. There’s another mystery solved! I must say I’m extremely impressed with your answer rate – do you ever sleep?!
S
Sometimes
Thanks Susannah
Hello,
I was just about to begin a new website using wordpress, but found that the facility to disable comments etc as mentioned in step 1 seems to have gone?
Hi Jake,
That feature is still alive and well in the most recent version of WordPress. What theme are you using?
I’m using the online wordpress at .com
I had no problems with my last site, but this time I’m not having much joy
Hi Don,
Thank you for providing such good information. I have a question, would WP be suitable for me if I were to build a simple 1 or 2 oages websites selling ebook? And I know you recommend to have a hosting service and install WP on our PC, just out of curiosity, why can’t you just build a site in the WP interface without downloading it to your PC and why is a hosting service necessary? I am sorry if the questions seem silly but I am not a very techy person and I am trying to know as much as I can before deciding on which program to use. Final question, have you heard about a site building program call Big Pixie? Someone recommended it to me. It seem to have many features but it charges an annual fee of USD $300 over a year, I am not sure if it is necessary. If you had heard about it would you mind commenting on the software? Thanks a million!!
Hi Carmen,
Yes, I use WordPress for small sites all the time. It depends on what you need to happen on those two pages. It might be easier to just create an HTML page for each of them if you know how.
I didn’t say anything about installing WordPress on your PC – you do need a hosting provider like BlueHost to host your website though.
Then if you want to install a custom theme then you can download the theme ZIP file, and upload it to your WordPress install.
As for Big Pixie, I’m sorry but I don’t know anything about it. But you can do WordPress a lot cheaper than $300 per year!
Thanks Don! Was just reading through your other articles and I have a better understanding now. Again, very useful information you have here! Thank you for all that. I think I agree with you, I might just give wordpress and shot. Thanks again!
Oh and just gotta give you credit for replying so promtly. Your response time is wayyy better than many customer support dept I’ve seen anywhere. Or it is true that you barely sleep? Thanks again!:)
Why thank you CarmenT
Ok, now I’ve got to go get some sleep…
Thanks for great info Don. I’m trying to set up a small business website with a blog of SEO. I’ve looked at a lot of websites and wordpress themes and it appears that the most common setup is to have a static homepage and separate blog page as a subdomain. However, wouldn’t it be more beneficial for SEO purposes to have the blog on the homepage so the new content is on the home page or does google not care where the new content is?
Hi Richard,
Actually it is best to have your blog in a subfolder under your domain – not a subdomain. A subdomain would look like: blog.yourdomain.com and a subfolder would look like: yourdomain.com/blog.
Nice post this will help me a lot
This was very helpful, however my two pages still say “LEAVE YOUR COMMENT” toward the top of one page and “COMMENTS OFF” at the top of the other. How do I take those things, as well as the date, off?
Hi,
I am creating my website with wordpress on my local computer.I will later put it online.My question is that,I made a folder in Wordpress and now for me to put the website online,will I use the URL as
http://www.mywebsite.com OR http://www.mywebsite.com/foldername.
I want the URL to be ending with .com and not with the / foldername.
Hi Sameera,
I just made a video about this here: How to Move WordPress to a different folder.
Thank you for your instructions on creating static pages. I wonder if you can help me: I’m getting “next page” navigation at the bottom of my static pages, I’m also getting the entire text of the “next page” appended below the current page. I made them as separate pages, not blog posts, so I am wondering why all my pages are showing up chronologically at the bottom of each page?
Hi Vivian,
Which Theme are you using? This is determined by your theme, and you can change it but you’ll have to edit the theme PHP files to do that.
Hello Don,
Thanks for your reply. I’m using Weaver. Can I solve this problem?
Hi Vivian,
You can solve the problem but you’ll need to edit your theme files, or find a programmer to edit them for you.
I found out what the “problem” was. I totally forgot I had installed a Grease Monkey script on my computer that lets me infinitely scroll through web pages. On other computers each page of my website remains static. “Problem” resolved, though not the problem of my leaky memory! Whew! No wonder no one could help me. Thanks for this great and helpful blog page, Don.
Hi, Don. I am redoing a website for an organization and I used wordpress.org to do the upgrade. How do I get the “wordpress” extension off the url — is this something you can change in wordpress when I’m ready to eliminate the old pages, or do I have to ask the webhost to do this? I couldn’t find instructions on this anywhere.
Hi Cassandra,
You probably have WordPress installed in its own folder, and want to move it to the root of the domain. This tutorial shows you how: How To Move WordPress.
Thank you. that seems simple enough. I am not quite sure about the root folder, I’m double-checking with the webhost so I don’t screw this up.
Hello,
I have a problem too.
I created the static front page but after that i made also more new pages bc i want them to be the other pages that my menu will have , right?
I cant figure out how they gonna appear at the menu bar…
Seems like the menu the way it is now wont change and my pages wont appear there
The template i use is Emergency 1.0 by Wordpress Themes Expert
Not sure if i explained well.
I want the other pages also to be static as well .
I want my page to be really like a full website with more pages in it but dont know how to make the rest of the pages to work as a full menu.
You can use add new page instead of post.
my reading settings interface looks different.. because im using wordpress version 3. navalstone
Hi,
I recently started a new website on wordpress, using all pages including the home page as ‘static pages’. I am sorting it out fairly well for now, but i have a couple of problems.
Every page i create tends to appear on my menu bar at the header, subsequently crowding the menu bar. I have no idea how to control what appears there. I only want ‘Home’ and ‘About Author’ to appear for now and not EVERY page.
Also, how do i remove the tags box below my content altogether, leaving the tag cloud on the side instead? It looks a bit untidy placed there.
I’ve read through your articles and comments and have really learnt a number of things now. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Virginia,
My pleasure!
The navigation menu and the tags really depend on the theme that you are using. But you can customize your navigation menu, and choose which pages display on it. Here is a video that shows you how.
Thank you so much Don. Will go and view it now.
Hello Don,
Thanks for your wonderful help the last time.
I may have a problem with my new website i think.
I did my main page as a POST, but it seems it should have been a PAGE. Am i correct?
Should i delete the post and republish on a page instead? I’m all mixed up now because there are 2 rows of menu in the header and i want remove the top row, but don’t know how.
Also, i need the visual editor tab when writing new pages, but only the HTML tab is visible. How do i get the visual editor to appear?
nice one …helpful for beginers…..
Hi Don,
Thanks for all your great articles ! I am trying to create a website with Wordpress, where I want the home page to feature a weekly video. Every week I want to put up a new video and move the “old” one to my archive. How do I achieve this, without having the old video just move below the new one, as it would if I just create a new post? And is the limit really only 10mb per video?
Thanks again!
Hi There, I’m hoping you will be able to assist me. I have just started putting together a WP site. Previously used Google Sites and so far loving what I see. The only thing I cant figure out for now is how to arrange the order of Pages. I am using wordpress.com to build my site (as apposed to downloading the installer etc). So far it looks like the pages are displayed in order of creation… I dont really want to go and delete and redo the pages in the order I want… Do you know of an easier way? I’ve looking on forums but all the answers deal with writing code if you are hosting your site yourself as opposed to the wp site.
Any assistance will be greatly appreaciated.
I am not sure why you want the pages reordered, but there are few things you can do:
If you just want the pages to appear in a different order in your menu navigation displayed on your website use the Appearance + Menu option in the admin panel. Create a Custom Menu — this will override your template that probably puts pages in menu lists in the order of the date they were created.
The Custom Menu option allows to select some pages or all pages and to rearrange them or indent them to create sub menus just be dragging them around on the screen.
If there was some other reason you want pages showing in a different order you can change their published date — that will reorder them. You do not have to delete the page and recreate it. You can change the publish date on any page OR post just by going into edit it selecting “Status: Published – Edit” — click on Edit and just change the date and Update the post/page. This will change the date and reorder it.
There is also a plug in you can download to allow you to drag on screen and change their order. But I suspect the reason you want to change page order is because of how they are showing up in your menu. If this is the case — just use the Custom Menu option.
Hope this helps
LAWolfe – exactly! Thanks.
KJ, you can set up custom menus in WordPress to reorder the menu items. Here’s a video that shows you how: WordPress Custom Navigation Menus
Hi there KJ,
I see you are using the “other” wordpress:
“I am using wordpress.COM to build my site”
You won’t be able to add plugins or do the same things which Don recommends when using Wordpress dot COM – their software doesn’t allow it.
To be able to do all the fabulous things shown on this website by Don, you’ll need to host your own Wordpress.ORG software with your own domain name (which is all very easy to do, I’m sure Don’s got instructions on the site here to show you how).
Once you start using Wordpress.ORG (which is called a “self-hosted” site when you host it with your own domain in your hosting account), you’ll be able to rearrange your Pages (rather than Posts, which are sorted by date) using My Page Order plugin, and using the Menu feature as Don recommends above. Please note these are two separate things – you can set up the Custom Menu to show only those pages you wish (like top-level pages).
Have fun!
Teena
Thanks @LAWolfe and @Don Campbell the custom menu option works perfect for me especially where I want users to link to a page not necessarily have that page as a tab on the main screen… thank alot
@Tina, thanks for the input, I am not really a techie but doing this for a religious organization just to get something up and running. Trying to figure it out as I go and for now using the online wordpress.com facility is as much as my brain can handle
You saved me so much time. Thank you for posting this.
nice information thank you very much for this useful information
Thank you very much, u have no idea how much u helped me ! CHEERS
Do you have any example sites that are entirely hosted on wordpress so I can see how they’ve turned out (some practical applications)?
I would love to see how the home pages are set up and being used.
Thanks
Hi Jae,
Yes, here are a few: SmallBiz Gallery. There are a lot of other examples on the web too. If you want to see some more let me know and I’ll try to come up with another list.
BTW – I looked at your site – it looks great! I like your sense of design!
THANKS for the compliment and the link.
I found this design here (http://www.networkinteriors.co.uk/), which is way cool and it says it’s all wordpress. I guess what my question is now is this all hosted on wordpress or somewhere else?
Do you have a link here that shows you how? Your videos are great and very helpful.
Thanks again!
Hi Jae,
Yes that’s a very nice looking site. It looks like it is self-hosted WordPress, which means you need to find a hosting provider (BlueHost is my recommendation) then you can install and customize WordPress all you like.
You can also host your WordPress blog on WordPress.com, but you are limited in the themes and plugins that you can use, and also limited in the amount of customization you can do. More on that here: WordPress.org vs WordPress.com, which one should I use?
Hi Don,
Hope you can help. I’m using the free Evolve theme. When I view my webpage http://www.forwardfacingcarseat.org/forward-facing-car-seat everything appears fine, but if I save it as a static page all the content lists as if it’s in a column a third of the page wide.
Hope that makes sense to you cos I’m kafuffled by it all.
Hi Forward Facing – it sounds like you may have introduced a syntax error in your page template. I’m not familiar with that theme and I can’t see the problem page so I really don’t know what could be causing it.
In wordpress there is always something new to learn, and you explained it very easy and clear. These is a very helpful post.
obviously I am doing something totally wrong. I have just installed Wordpress (3.2.1) on my home machine and the admin panel (dashboard) looks nothing at all like your example pictures at the top of this page. Is your turorial out of date or am I in the wrong part of WordPress ???
Elenore,
Yes, the screen shots were from an older version of WordPress.
I’ve updated them and replaced the old ones with the new ones in this blog post above. Thanks for the reminder
Thanks Don. However, my “Readings Settings” page still does not look like your picture.
I have two radio buttons. one labeled ‘Your Latest posts’ and one labeled ‘A ststic page’ with the words ‘static page’ being a clickable link. Additionally, the ‘Front page:’ and ‘Posts page’ are drop down boxes not ones with up/down arrows like yours…. and neithert of my drop down box’s give the the choice of ‘Home’…. [I tell you Don, Jomla is easier than this
]
Elenore,
Do you know what version of WordPress you are using? Also which browser/version are you using? If you can show me a screen shot or something that would help.
Don, I sent an email to you with screenshot. I hope this was right thing to do.
Hi Don,
I’m trying to create an offroad website with a home page that will have navigation links to other pages, and the ability to sell merchandise. I will feature stories on offroad vehicles with photos, videos of trail rides and events, product reviews, and offroad news and information.
To make money I want to sell products that I have designed such as t-shirts and decals, and also advertising space to offroad related companies. Advertising will probably consist of links to company websites that I will charge for.
I don’t know how to create my own website, so I started searching and came up with Blogger, Wordpress, and Drupal, which led me to Subhub.com.
I started creating a free site, which is http://www.offroadtraxx.subhub.com. It’s not completed, but it will give you an idea of what I’m trying to do. I like how I can edit the pages, and add different features, but there are still some issues and I also want more control over the layout.
I set up an account with Mailchimp to create HTML emails and add a subscription sign up form to my site. I want to send out emails with articles that will contain links back to my site for people to continue reading. I will also be able to add links for advertisers.
In your posts I see that Wordpress can be set up to create a website like this, so I registered a domain with Godaddy and have installed Wordpress software from Wordpress.org.
I’m kind of stuck now trying to figure out how to get all of this set up properly. I was hoping to find a template that I could use, and edit to achieve the look I’m going for, but haven’t found one yet.
Any suggestions for me on templates, or whether I should be using Wordpress or Blogger. This is all new to me so I’m not sure if I’m on the right track or not.
WORDPRESS HELP
Is there a way to make a make link DIRECTLY to another webpage?
you click Italian Version and it goes to http://www.trattoriadelrosso.it
thanks
Hello Don,
Thanks for the wonderful tips.
I have this problem in my website which I developed using wordpress.
When I add content, it wouldnt update properly, it would delete the content and a quarter of the content will be published say 2-3 lines.
Sometimes it would go blank.
I reckon the problem started when I started using special characters like £, Trademark Symbol.
I customised a them to make it more suitable for my website.
Is it something got to do with the style sheets?
Would you know how to fix it?
Please feel free to contact me at my email.
Thanks
Hi Pixie,
I’m sorry but I don’t know what could be causing that. Make sure you are looking at the blog post page and not the excerpt page – many these will list all your blog posts with only a little bit about each until you click through to see the entire blog post. I’m wondering if you may be looking at the excerpt page?
Does a static page WP site need fresh content once you get a good page rank.
Ryan,
Not necessarily, but the site itself needs to be updated with fresh content.
It’s not something that’s been mentioned but having a static page is better for SEO purposes. The trouble with having the WP blog as your site’s home page is the content is always changing so it’s a lot trickier to optimise the page properly. With a fixed page, you can still have dynamic content via the sidebar so there is new content regularly added but you have the added benefit of being able to optimise your home page perfectly.
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