WordPress Setup and Layouts- Blog and Website

Although WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform it is also used as a traditional website.

Therefore one of the first decisions you will need to make is whether you want to configure WordPress as. There are three main options:

• Standard Blog
• Standard Website
• Standard Website + Blog

Although the configuration can be easily changed at any stage with just a few mouse clicks, changes may have search engine and domain impacts. To illustrate lets say we are going to start with a standard blog and we install WordPress on the main domain so that the address is:

www.mydomain.com

Now this is how millions of blogs are configured, and it is perfectly ok. However later we decide that we want to set up a website + blog. There are two main ways of configuring it.

In both case the website goes onto the main domain and the blog is either placed in a subdirectory or a subdomain as follows:

website at www.mydomain.com and blog at  www.mydomain.com/blog

website at www.mydomain.com and blog at blog.mydomain.com

In either case the old blog content needs to move to the new location which will impact any links that are currently pointing to it. This is a non trivial move and best avoided.

Understanding the Blog Home Page

Following our discussion above the blog home page can be located at:

www.mydomain.com or blog.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/blog

Where exactly it is located has no impact on how it is created and formatted.

The First thing to understand is that blog entries are called posts. A blog entry is like a standard web page containing text, images etc and has a web address like any web page.

So for example a post called post1 would have a web address like:

blog.mydomain.com/post1

This address is what is commonly called the permalink (or permanent address). However that is not the only place this post will appear! It appears temporarily on the blog home page until it is eventually replaced by newer posts.

As an example consider a new blog which has three posts added. The Home Page would look like the schematic below.

After 1 Post	After second Post	After Third Post

How many posts appear on the blog home page is configurable (10 is common) and how much of the post i.e. all of it or just a snippet is also configurable.

You can see from the above that the purpose of the blog home page is to introduce new content to the blog visitors.

Configuring WordPress as a Standard Website.

A standard website has a static or relatively static home page which introduces the website.

WordPress introduced WordPress pages to hold static content; like that which is found on pages like:

• Contact pages
• Privacy Policy
• About-Us

and of course a static Home Page.

When you create a WordPress page it doesn't appear on the blog home page and sits outside of the main blog content. When you create a WordPress Post it does appear on the blog home page and sits inside the main blog content.

The first step to configuring WordPress to look like a standard website is to create two pages.

1. One for the website home page
2. One for the Blog Home Page

I usually name these pages index and blog respectively

The go to Options>reading and click the static front page radio button and select the pages using the drop down menu as shown below (graphic Uses pages called home and blog).

You should note that you need to tell WordPress where to put the blog home page and any posts you make will appear there. However you don't need to create any new posts and you don't need to provide any navigation to the blog page if you're not using it.

So even though the blog page does exist you don't have to use it.

When configured this way it is normal to create new content as pages and not posts.

Pages can be structured in a hierarchical fashion to achieve a standard website layout.

Configuring WordPress as a Standard Website Plus Blog

In effect when we configure WordPress with a static Home page we have configured it as a website plus blog.

As you can see form the discussion above the blog will be located at  www.mydomain.com/blog and the website at  www.mydomain.com

However in this case will will provide navigational links to the blog and we will add posts as well as pages.

If you remember earlier we mentioned using a sub-domain for the blog. This requires a second installation of WordPress and is not advised. Putting the blog on a subdomain (I do it) is more common when the main site isn't a WordPress site.

Just as an example, my main site www.build-your-website.co.uk is a standard html template site, and the blog located at blog.build-your-website.co.uk is a WordPress blog.

Notes:

When selecting the page to use you should be aware that the page title is displayed and not the page name.

When you create a  page or a post the page/post name defaults to the post title but spaces are replaced by hyphens and all lower case. Therefore if you created a page and the title was: Home Page then the page name would be home-page.

 To ensure that the page has the name index you need to edit the page slug and type in the page name there.

The page slug is used to create page/post names of your choosing rather than rely on the default names.

See Creating SEO Friendly Page and Post Names

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