Many business owners today would like to incorporate a blog into their website. The Wordpress blogging platform is a simple to use platform with thousands of template designs, making it a popular choice. However, the Wordpress default configuration places the blog as the main landing page of the website. This tutorial will explain how to choose a static page as the main landing page and make the blog a secondary page.

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.