Creating a Static Home Page & Blog Section with Thesis – WordPress

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I recently set up a couple of new sites that required a home page that stayed the same all the time and a couple of other pages for information.  More of a content management site then a blog.  I still wanted the ability to continuously add pages/posts like a blog but I needed some static structure to the site as well.  I had seen some sites like this, built with Thesis, but I could not quit figure out how to do it.

So, like many other things I have done over the past couple of years of being an online marketer and website creator, I searched and scoured the internet for the answer.  It came from a couple of sources and then of course I figured a few things out on my own or realized a slightly better way to do the process that fit my needs.

I have created a short tutorial on how I did it:

With a few quick page set ups you can create a static home page and a blog section to handle your blog posts in your Thesis WordPress site.

The process is simple but does require WordPress 2.3.1 or later):

1. Create a new page that will become your home page.  It does not matter what you name it.  You will be able to still use the “Home” tab in your navigation menu (Make sure it’s a page, not a post.)

2.    Scroll down to the Discussion options and remove the checks next to Allow comments and Allow pings.

3.    Click the Publish button to publish your new page.

4.  Create another New Page for your Blog Page.  This will be a blank page.   Name it “Blog” or  something like “Your Name Blog” .  Go ahead and Publish the page.

5.  In the Settings Group for in your WordPress Dashboard, click on Reading

6.   Under Front page, click the Static page option.

• Choose  the pages to use for the static home page and blog posts.
• Open the Front page list and choose the page you want to use as your static home page.
• Open the Post page list and choose the page you want to use to display your blog posts.
• Save your changes.

If you’re using Thesis, you need to choose to have new pages displayed as tabs in the navigation bar:

You will also choose to Show home link in nav menu.   This is how you will still have a navigation menu that says home but your actual home page might be called something else.

Remember you can move the nav menu choices around to put them into a different order and you can also change the menu title names if you want.

Please leave me some feedback if you found this post helpful.

Tagged as: home page. static page, Thesis, Wordpress