Case Study- Wedding and Family Website- Part 1- page 3

continued from page 2

In the site overview I said that I wanted the home page to have latest news links. The idea being that the visitors enter via the home page and immediately know if there is anything new.

However before we can configure the home page to contain links to the posts we need some posts.

Adding a few Posts

I've decided to add a few posts before we go onto the home page because I want to link to them from the home page. In practise you would do the home page first and re-edit later it to include the blog posts.

Editing the Home Page.

Go to Manage>pages and select the home page and click on the edit link.

Here we are going to add a little more text to make it look more like a home Page. The content I'm going to add is enclosed in dotted lines below.

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Well we are finally getting married. Harry and I met in July 2006 and now its March 2008 and we've decided its time to tie the knot. The wedding will be in on October 21 2008.

The wedding will take place At St Johns church in Ironbridge followed by a reception for invited guests at the AAA restaurant in Ironbridge.

We hope to get the invitations out by the end of April and you can either use the reply envelope or RSVP online here (link to RSVP).

Latest News

Here you can manually add excerpts from the blog posts or better still get them auto inserted (not possible on the free wordpress blog).

Here is an example of manually added The posts do exist.

• university Pictures
• Hotel deals

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Wrapping Up

This is were I will abandon the free blog in favour or a self hosted blog which give me more control and flexibility. That doesn't mean that you cannot develop your site further with the free blog but you should be aware that it is much more limited than a self hosted blog.

In particular you cannot

• Modify the themes
• Add additional themes
• Add plug-ins (these provide extra functionality e.g. contact form, photo album).

However I hope that it has given you a feel as to how easy it is to start with WordPress and how powerful it is.

Feel free to comment and ask questions. If there are enough questions/comments I will do a post case study report.