Comments on: How to have a Static Home Page or First post in Wordpress

By: Pat EA

Pat EA — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:07:15 +0000

I have used WP themes that have this included in the past but I have always wanted to be able to use a static page on a theme without this built in. Now I can use a bunch of themes that I always wanted to.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:31:21 +0000

Hi Suzanne,

Thanks for that, I’ve been looking for something that would do this for ages, and yours is the 1st I’ve found that I could get to work.

The problem has always been that because the site has a totally hacked theme (doesn’t really have that Wordpress look) whenever I tried to put in a blog page it always removed the theme, or most of it’s settings.

I added your code, or most of it to a seperate template file & everything works. What I can’t get to work is that if I leave the post titles as links, posts still don’t display on their own properly, but I don’t need that anyway. All I wanted was to be able to have a news/blog page that I could update regularly & display the last 5 or 10 posts.

The page is working but not linked to in the site yet. Should be there in the next few days/weeks.

Steve

By: admin

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:55:31 +0000

Hi Andy – glad you got it to work! Sorry I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to your question about the images. You may be better asking this on a WordPress forum.

Cheers,
Suzanne

By: andy

andy — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:10:13 +0000

hi Suzanne – thanks! this worked very nicely for me.
I had a question: is there a simple line of code I can add that would pull in the first image I included within each blog post it is posting?

I imagine something like

any ideas?

By: Ali

Ali — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:29:03 +0000

Hey,

I can’t get this to work When I paste the code, it just removes my sidebar and footer. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Ali

By: tina

tina — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:19:44 +0000

Still trying to get the code to work. Think it because I have intalled a them in word press and I am not sure exactly what to leave in and what to delete after the code. And on another note- about the static home page. I based it on a page called it’s all about Theo, so now I have two pages that look exactly the same… I cannot deleted the page that the home page is based on since then it will have no reference. How did you work around this issue?

tina

By: James T

James T — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:19:32 +0000

Hi Suzanne

Just a note to everone else. I had a parse error in my page.php code. I just changed the apostrophe to a quote:

“showposts=5″. Now it works!

Anyways, just to complicate matters, I would like my front page to be pretty spectacular. Therefore I want in this order:
1. Description of the website
2. Latest posts
3. Google map embedded
4. Another description/piece of text
5. Another description/piece of text

So the problem I have is that becuase the map and the bits of text are are incorporated in the one text box on the static editing page, the posts get displayed after, whereas I want the posts second.

Can anyone help?

Unfortunately I’m working offline through my server so I have nothing to show you

James

By: Mal Tindle

Mal Tindle — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:10:29 +0000

Hi Suzanne,

Thank you so much for explaining this so well. Having just aquired a WP site I was wondering how to ad a static welcome page without it being affected by every post but is is easy now that you have explained it.

I don’t know if you are planning any training on background and sidebar colour changes in the future as that is my next step for the ugly duckling LOL,

thanks again,

Mal.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:45:12 +0000

Hi Nat,

With blogging there are two different types of SEO:

1) Optimizing your individual blog posts
2) Optimizing your blog home page

Having a static home page will help with (2). This is because if your blog is set up in the traditional way, with snippets of the latest posts, or the last 5 or so posts, the keywords on your page will be changing constantly, your main keywords are not likely to be in every post you make and so it may be more difficult to rank for your target home page keywords.

I’m not saying that you can’t have an optimized blog home page wthout doing this, but is it just one way of making sure that your main keywords are prevelant in the first part of your home page.

Cheers,
Suzanne

By: Nat Colley

Nat Colley — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:37:51 +0000

Could you explain exactly how this improves SEO?