Making your blog your website from scratch

Now a blog is a website, so this title might be confusing for established bloggers and net types. But many students think of a website as being separate to a blog.

This is mostly relevant to how they want their readers / audience to navigate or more through their blog/website when they get there.

So this post is about how to turn your blog into a “website” or about how to experiment with landing pages and where your blog posts sit.

Here’s an example of a simple wordpress.com blog that’s been cleverly set-up to look like a static website with a blog page as well - widgety goodness (another one of our projects - and a great one-day conference all about widgets in Brighton UK on 6 December).

It was inspired by the inimitable Lucy West from the Monday group, from memory. And I think Jeddah Mali wanted to look at this option too. So Jeddah & Lucy - this one’s for you.

Others might like to experiment and please always ask users for feedback, keep surfing to see what others bloggers and website creators are doing, and review your own experience against your intentions and goals from time to time.

To create a ’static’ front page (& move blog posts from the front)

1. Consider the user experience you are trying to offer.

What do you want to communicate? How will you say it, show it, make it look and feel? What emotions, ideas, thoughts are you wanting to put across?

2. Create a new front page (or use an existing page you have created, eg. “About”) (A)

That has words, images, links etc as you want your front page to appear.

(Dashboard > Write > Write Page)

(or Dashboard > Manage > New Page (see text at top).

Format it as you will. Explore formatting options eg. colour, bold (see last button for advanced text editing) and experiment. Remember to save changes.

3. Create a new page for blog posts to move to (B)

See above. Simple add in a title and no text. A new tab will automatically be created if your theme displays tabs. If not, try a new theme.

This might be called “blog” or “news” or “updates” or “musings” or “let’s talk” or something else depending on what you want to do with it.

4. Position new front page and move blog posts.

Go to Dashboard > Options > Reading. Select:

<A static page>

Front page <select the page you just created or chose “A”>

Posts page <select the page your blog posts will move to “B”>

Update options.
If you have an existing website

- Integrate / Embed or Replace your Exisiting Website

To give this title justice, the other points to be made are linked to discussions with Garth Spiers, Julia Dunlop, Trevor Cousins and Assuntina Cardillo-Zallo:

- You can integrate your blog into an existing website (more to come on options for that)

- You can replace an existing, static website. Simple create the pages and subpages you need (see Page Parent option when editing a page - the blue box on the right). Cut and paste from existing website, save and upload images. Keep checking that the user experience and navigation are as you would like them to be. It can take some time, but at least you will end up with a blog site that engages readers much more and can be easily updated, hence ranking higher with Google and achieving more of the vast potential blogs have to offer.

Additional help is available if you need support due to time or technical reasons. We work with good people who can arrange a smooth transition at reasonable rates, but you can just do it yourself if you focus or find a clever friend to help a little.

Julia and others from that discussion. Would you like to add anything here in the comments?