I searched the web and couldn’t find an explanation. I seemed to have followed the markdown instructions properly. By trial and error I managed to come up with a solution – I needed a blank line both before and after the list.

My original markup that displayed incorrectly:

My new markup that worked:

You learn something new every day!

According to the Worpress Codex, any page can be set as the front page simply by editing the settings. First you must create two pages – the html page you want to use as the main landing page (call it “Home”) and a blank blog page (call it “Blog”).

In the WordPress Admin interface select Settings > Reading. Look for the section titled “Front page displays” and select “A static page (select below)”. In the drop-down box for front page choose your “Home” page. In the drop-down list for Posts page choose your “Blog” page.

You will now have a new static front page and a blog page.

Finally, depending on your theme, you might have 2 navigation links to the home page. You can remove the duplicate easily by first determining the page number used for the static front page.

(From WordPress.com: You can determine the page number by going to Pages->Edit and hovering over the title of the page. The status bar of your browser will display a URL with a numeric ID at the end. This is the page ID.)

Determine the file where the navigation is displayed (it may be header.php) and find the wp_list_pages statement. Exclude the static front page:

wp_list_pages('exclude=7');

Now, if you want your home page to be more dynamic you can create a custom page template for the home page. To learn more about using page templates, visit the Codex here.

This should be all you need to do to create a static front page and a secondary blog page. This change allows the WordPress platform to be used on most websites, with the blogging secondary to the main website content.