Set Your Homepage
Your home page is basically your website’s soul. People will judge you on your website’s cover. That’s quite harsh, but that’s the reality. Have you ever stumbled into a website with poor design? Somehow, your interest and trust in the website is becoming low, trust me.
So, what you have to do is to aim for a good-looking home page and set them properly. The first time you start a WordPress site, the page will always get the ‘default’ look. This is actually the blog article page where your posts appear every time you upload a new one. You will also see a “Hello World” article on it. This is not our article. WordPress gives every single of their new users a blog article sample and page sample automatically. You can delete this and post your own blog contents later, though.
The page is also your current home page. To make it better, let’s add a new page dedicated to your new home page.
This is how to make a home page for your site:
Go to your dashboard and on the left sidebar, find the “Pages” and click “Add Pages”.
After you are directed to the “add new page”, type “Home” in the column title. When you type here, a permalink will appear. The permalink is your website URL and your page title. The link is how to get to the page we are creating right now. For example, the permalink is idglanz.com/home. We don’t want to type the “/home” every time we are going to visit the site, right?
Begin with setting the home page for the idglanz.com. In the page editor, you can see some main features including a big text box and the text styling options above it. This is where you design your content and what you are going to post. On the right side, there is a “Publish” section where you can publish your contents, save it as a draft, or “preview” it. You can also edit the “Visibility” of your post here.
Below the “Publish” section, there is a “Page Attributes” section where you can make a certain template for your page. Some themes come with multiple templates; for example a portfolio page template, contact page template, and more. These will be explained further in the other lesson.
Now, publish the page. Once you have published a page, you can view it by clicking the “view page”, or just click on the permalink.
Open it on the new tab! Now the home page will appear on the link idglanz.com/home. If you go to idglanz.com, you will still get the “Hello World” page again, where all your future blogs are going to appear on.
Now to set the “Home” as our home page, go under the “Settings” and click “Reading”.
Set the front page display to “As a Static Page and set the “Homepage” as your front page.
The next thing we should do is to set the “Posts page” into another page. You need to add a new page. Just control-click (ctrl) it or command-click if you are on Mac to open it on the new tab.
Rename this page’s title as you wish and select publish.
This page won’t appear until you click “save changes” so that the new page will appear on the choices. Now refresh the page, and you can select the “posts page” with the page you made just now. Some of you might don’t need a post page, so if you don’t, just ignore it.
Click save changes. After the changes we have made, let’s go back to our website which is idglanz.com.
Refresh it, and now the idglanz.com will show the home page rather than the blog page including that “Hello World”.
If you click the website logo on the top right of the page, it will send you back to the home page we had set just now. To get to the blog page, you can type “idglanz.com/blog”, or the page name you have input.
So that’s how to add a new page on your website and to set your new home page. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next cool lessons!
Review:
1. Is home page important for your website? Why?
2. What is the default page appearing on our website for the first time?
3. How to set the “home” page we have made into a static front page?