WordPress for Websites: Setting the homepage (old screenshots, same awesome feature)

As many of you know, WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms out there, but you can also use WordPress as an amazing CMS (content management system) for creating a beautifully laid out, interactive, fast loading website which can be updated by computer geeks like me, or non-technical people. This series of posts, WordPress for Websites, should serve as a basic setup to get you started, after you install/have WordPress installed through your website hosting company.

Right out of the box, WordPress is setup to be a web blog, so the first page it displays when you goto your website URL is a page that lists the recent blog posts – which will just be the sample post and comment if you just installed WordPress.  Most people, including myself, prefer to have a “home page”/”welcome page” be the first thing that gets seen. If you have just installed WordPress, then we need to create a “welcome page” and a “blog posts page” and then tell WordPresss what to load.

1. Login to the WordPress administration section for your website. This URL is usually www.yoursite.com/wp-admin, where “www.yoursite.com” is the location where you installed WordPress.  Check with your hosting company if you are unsure. (You should see a login screen where you put the username and password you setup when installing WordPress through your hosting company)
   
2. To add a “home page” to your new site, click the “Pages” menu tab on the far left of the screen which will bring up the Pages section.
   1. Click “Add New” button beside where it says “Pages”
      
   2. Type the title for the page
   3. Enter some text/content into the large text box in the center of the screen
      
   4. You can either click the Preview button in the top left to see what it will look like or click the Publish button when you are done.
3. Now, we need to create another page there your blog posts will go. (You can simply follow the steps in bullet point #2 and name this page sometime that references blog posts) Except leave the large content textbox blank
   
4. With those pages created, it is time to change the WordPress settings
   1. Click the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the page
   2. Click Reading
      
   3. On that page, you will see at the top where it says “Front page displays” you want to click beside where it says “Static Page”
   4. Then, you need to tell WordPress what pages to load for the Front Page and Posts Page (the pages we just created above)
   5. Click the dropdown boxes for each and select the appropriate pages
      
   6. Scroll down and click the Save Changes button
5. Now when you goto www.yoursite.com, the first page to be displayed will be the “home page” you just created, instead of the recent blog posts