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.
- 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)
- 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.
- Click “Add New” button beside where it says “Pages”
- Type the title for the page
- Enter some text/content into the large text box in the center of the screen
- 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.
- Click “Add New” button beside where it says “Pages”
- 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
- With those pages created, it is time to change the WordPress settings
- Click the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the page
- Click Reading
- 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”
- Then, you need to tell WordPress what pages to load for the Front Page and Posts Page (the pages we just created above)
- Click the dropdown boxes for each and select the appropriate pages
- Scroll down and click the Save Changes button
- 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
