One Snarky Chica with Issues

I have been working over the weekend on a couple of other websites that I have and wanted to share how incredibly easy it is to make non-blog websites with WordPress and to even have a static page as the main page of a blog.

I use Dreamhost for my hosting, despite their recent server issues that resulted in some rather lengthy downtime. Anyways, WordPress is a one-click easy install in Dreamhost so it literally takes about 2 minutes to set up a site using WordPress. The first site that I was working on was not one for me but a site that I was helping someone else out with. The site was already live but was not using WordPress which meant that when pages needed to be updated it could be a lengthy process as it involved needing Dreamweaver and a FTP client. That is no longer the case though as is will now function as a WordPress site so all upkeep can be done simply by having the internet.

If you are interested in setting up your own static page via WordPress it is really quite simple. Here are the steps if you have a blog and want a main page that is a static page:

1. When you are ready to create your static page, go to Write–> Write Page.
2. Under the discussion box on the top right you will want to disable comments and pings. All you have to do for this is to untick the boxes.
3. Look for ‘page slug’ a few boxes below the discussion box. The name that you key in here will be the url that people will see for permalinks. You can leave it alone and it will fill automatically from the page name or you can customize it. For instance, if I wanted a static page that was not a main page and I wanted it named ‘test’ the url would look like www.chicawithissues.com/test/
4. The ‘page order’ section lets you specify if you want the pages to show up in a certain order in the menu. I leave this alone as my default was alphabetical and that worked just fine for me.
5. To make you static page the main page of the site you will need to go to Options –>Reading. Once there look where it says ‘front page’ and change that to ’static’ and then select the page that you have just created from the drop down. Once that is saved your blog will start showing up with the new static page as the main page of your site.

You can also create an entire site that is not a blog at all using WordPress static pages.

Follow the same steps as above only create multiple pages from Write–>Page to create all of the pages for your site. I tweaked some of the HTML and took out the comments and the date from the posts so that it did not show up on the site.

For a nice, clean theme for your page I suggest checking out the WordPress Theme Generator.