Static Home Page with Blog Roll

bynathanpall99

1.2K followers

Updated 9 years ago

So I've spent a few days (on and off when I'm not writing content) working out how to create my home page so that begins with static content and is followed by the blogroll. You can see the end result here http://snowboardingprofiles.com/

From what I've read it is good for SEO purposes to have the blogroll on your home page. At the same time I really wanted a "static page look" as it felt like a tidier home page look. So I figured out how to have my cake and eat it too!

Unfortunately it's a bit of a individualized solution for any with a theme that is part of the Genesis framework. If not then hopefully this post can still help lead you in the right direction - but won't offer a complete solution unfortunately. I will end with some suggestions for how you might be able to do it with other methods.

The Solution for the Genesis Framework

So it was actually quite simple in the end - after trying a few other things that didn't quite work - but I'll cut to the chase.

In the end I posted the question on the genesis forum and someone replied with this page template http://genesisdeveloper.me/full-width-page-content-with-blog-posts/ - PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS TEMPLATE WILL ONLY WORK WITHIN THE GENESIS FRAMEWORK.

So I copy and pasted that code into notepad and saved as the name suggested in the post linked above - with the .php extension as opposed to the .txt extension that would normally be generated by a notepad file (I assume that this is important). I then uploaded that page template to my theme's folder using the Filezilla ftp server. See this training https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/accessing-your-website-via-ftp/what-is-ftp for how to do that.

Then it was simply a matter of going into the wordpress editor for the page I had created and choosing the page template that I had uploaded and Voila. See screenshot below

The Solution for Other Themes

Unfortunately I don't have a complete answer for those not with a Genesis theme. However, if you know someone who is good at creating code they could create you a template like the above one to go with your theme.

Choose A New Theme Option

In my search for a solution on this I did happen to run into (suggested by WA members - who else!) a couple of themes that have home pages that are already designed like this - i.e. with content to begin with followed by a blogroll. The two that I came across were:

Minamaze

Cyberchimp

If there are 2 and I didn't really do a big search I'm sure there are several themes that do this - I really wanted to stick with the theme I had as it did everything else I wanted - however if you aren't tied to a particular theme I imagine you can find a theme that does this fairly easily.

Other Solutions

I also tried some other things including using widgets and hooks (had no clue how these worked but followed instructions and got close without quite getting there). Again I think this was a Genesis specific one though.

Another link that may or may not be useful is below. I read through this and this might work but was a bit over my head in terms of the coding involved. I was going to return to this if the other options I had didn't work.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/using-static-front-page-add-blogroll-to-bottom

Conclusions

I hope this has at least helped you get one step closer to being able to do this (and haven't confused the situation further!) - if this happens to be how you want to set up your home page.

Anyone with any knowledge on this subject or other solutions or potentially with page templates that work with other themes please add your comments - would be very helpful thanks.

Nathan