Layout WordPress as a Website plus Blog

There are two ways of configuring WordPress depending on whether you are using it as blogging platform or a standard website.

Blog

You don't need to make any configuration changes if you want WordPress to look like a standard blog as it does by default. With a blog the home page contains  the latest posts with the most recent one at the top.

As you create new posts they are added to the home page and the oldest posts are removed from the home page.

Standard Website

With this configuration the home page is static and not affected by new posts. Normally you still retain the blog but move it to another page.

My preferred configuration is to use a page called index for the home page and another page called blog that will contain the blog.

To do that you need to create the pages and configure a static home page.  To do that go to Options>reading and click the static front page radio button and select the pages using the drop down menu as shown below (Uses pages called home and blog).

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 post slug and type in the page name there.

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

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