I was talking with one of my clients the other day, a small business owner (Chiropractor) and he was trying to get his head around the whole WordPress as a website concept.
I was explaining to him that on a blog, the first page you see is typically a list of all the latest blog posts by date.
But what many small business owners want is something that looks more like a website to represent their business. They want a more static home page, but they also want to keep the ability to blog and publish fresh new content easily.
Then suddenly he said:
“I’ve got it! So you are telling me that a WordPress Website is just a blog, but you’ve moved the “blog” section over to a new tab on the nav menu and just replaced the home page with something different!”
Exactly.
WordPress as a Blog
Here is a screen shot of a typical blog, using the default WordPress theme. You can see the blog posts on the home page – listed in reverse chronological order.
This is great if you are running a blog, but if you are running a business website you’ll want to have a different home page that makes it easy for potential customers to understand what you do and how to contact you.
WordPress as a Website
What you can do is specify a different page to be your home page, and now your “blog” is instantly transformed into a “website” that is easy for you to update and publish new content to!
And you still have the ability to blog on your new website. We just move the page that shows the blog posts to your navigation menu.
If you click on the “blog” tab in the navigation menu, then you will get the page that shows you your blog posts. This page is automatically updated whenever you publish a new blog post too.
Note: I used the SmallBiz WordPress Theme to make the WordPress Website in the example above.
WordPress Website Video
Here’s a short video showing the difference between a WordPress Website and Blog.
For a tutorial on how to do this with the default WordPress theme, see this video: How to Make WordPress Look Like a Website.
