How to create and what to put on your blog’s homepage

You all know that a blog contains posts. That’s what it’s mainly for. And magically they appear on your blog’s first page in all their glory!

But, what if you wanted to treat your blog as a website, and have a front page that was different from the post listings page?

(This will only be suitable if you have a business-like approach to your blog. You need to decide what the first page people land on in your blog should be: a description of what you do and stand for, or a nicely updated list of your latest posts.)

Well, it’s easier than you think to create a separate homepage! Here’s how (using WordPress).

First, in the Dashboard, find Settings and select Reading, and you should see this at the top of the page:

You can see your front page currently displays your latest posts. Now if you want to change this, you’ll need to create the special page that will become your new homepage, or the page your blog’s URL will automatically go to.

So, go back to the Dashboard, find Pages and select Add New to bring up the page template:

Now all you have to do at this moment is give it a name: Home, Welcome or whatever. Then publish it, just as it is. You don’t have to populate it with any words at this stage.

Now do the same again, but call this second page Blog, Articles, News or whatever you want. Again just publish it, just as it is. This one definitely needs to be empty of any text.

Then go back to Settings and select Reading again:

And now you click on the ‘A static page (select below)’ button.

And below, for the front page, find your newly created Home page. And do likewise for the posts page and select the empty page you’ve called Blog.

And once you’ve saved your Settings > Reading page, the magic will happen, and you’ll find all your posts will be listed under the page called Blog (or whatever you’ve called it).

Now you can have fun populating your homepage. Here’s an infographic I created to give you some guidelines:

Now there’s a heck of a lot of information here, so I suggest you should choose what is most important to you and try and include it in your new homepage.

And if you want to read one of my posts about how I recently redesigned my homepage on Fairy Blog Mother, click here.