Changing the Default Landing (Home) Page

How to look like a normal website instead of a blog

This turns out to be the key feature to losing the “bloggy” look and setting up a WordPress site that looks like a regular website. In my case, the static Bacon Please (Home) page is the default landing page while the Blog page appears in the menu as just another page. The point is that visitors, by default, land on the static Bacon Please home page, not the Blog page.

Here is how it’s done — Actually quite easy!

One of the great features of the Bouquet theme is the option to display a static page full-width, without the sidebar. By setting my regular (static) pages to the Full-width, no sidebar option, those pages lose the sidebar, becoming full-width pages with no blog features—the sidebar is then retained only on the actual blog pages.

How cool is that?

WordPress Design Tips

From WordPress.org

• Introduction to Blogging
• First Steps With WordPress
• Theme Development

Other tutorials

• Building Custom WordPress Theme
• 110+ Massive WordPress Video Tutorial Collection
• Top 50 WordPress Tutorials

Just for fun

• How a Web Design Goes Straight to “Heck”

Why This Theme?

Review and select the themes available to you in WordPress. Select and install the theme that you like the best. In a new post, write why you selected a theme.

Looking through the available themes, it was hard to decide which to use (or even what criteria to use in making the decision). At first, I filtered for Custom Header and number of columns… with no success in finding a satisfying choice. After looking at some of the themes, though, I became aware of the Post Formats feature. This seemed like an interesting feature, so I filtered for Post Formats and then Custom Header.

There were 27 matches, three of which were premium ($) themes. That left 24 viable themes. Of those, my favorites were:

• Bouquet
• Coraline
• Mystique
• Twenty Eleven
• Rusty Grunge
• Chunk
• Fruit Shake
• DePo Masthead
• Reddle

I ended up choosing the Bouquet theme, mostly because:

• It had an option to remove the sidebar from the static pages
• One of its color palettes (the Tiger Lily theme option) looked pretty good with the header image I had decided to use
• It comes with support for the image, gallery, and aside Post Formats