Building a website
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Can I build a website around an already existing blog?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi ademey1hotmailcom,
It is possible to do a number of things to further adapt your current site to what you’d like it to be. The joy of WordPress! It just depends on what you would like the final product to be.
What would you like the website to be and do?
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I want to keep my blog about it’s original intent, trying to write a book, and build a website around it talking about and displaying hobbies and other stuff.
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Are you using the Free Plan on WordPress.com for your current blog? And what theme are you using?
I ask because, as far as I can see, on the Free Plan it is only possible to have one rolling blog in which you publish new posts like you have now.
However, I can see two initial options for having more pages or categories that allow you to showcase your different thematic content as you want to.
OPTION 1
The way to build a larger website around the blog post feed is to create static pages – like the current Contact page on your site for example – and publish your other content there. So you could create a static page that people could navigate to from your menu at the top of the webpage. To create a new page you would navigate to My Site > Site Pages > Add New Page. And then as you would a normal post, you give it a title – like Hobbies – and add content to it. The question is whether you are going to publish regularly on a page like that because manually editing a static page may be rather cumbersome after a while; it wouldn’t be like writing up a blog post, publishing and automatically having that post displayed by date. But you could create a number of pages in that way according to the topics you desire, and then edit those pages manually each time you want to add content. To display those page titles in your main menu, so that viewers may easily navigate to them, click My Site > Customize > Menus > Primary Menu > Add Items > then add the new site pages you created to the menu and Publish. That should add them to the menu.
OPTION 2
However, if you anticipate publishing regularly to those other categories besides your Book, then another option is to not create more Pages but use Categories for each of your blog posts and group them in the main menu accordingly. When you publish a Post, in the Post editor select Categories in the left-hand sidebar and assign a Category for the post. In the beginning, since you don’t have any Categories set yet you would select Add New Category, call it, for example, My Book, or Hobbies, etc. You can then assign all your existing posts to those Categories by going to My Site > Blog Posts > and then edit each post and select the appropriate Category in the left-hand sidebar. Having assigned all your posts to the key Categories (My Book, Hobbies, etc), you can then add those Categories to your Menu by clicking My Site > Customize > Menus > Primary Menu > Add Items > Categories > then select the + sign next to the Categories you want in the Menu > Publish. What you will then see on your landing page is your whole blog thread like you do now, with all your posts in chronological order, and the Menu at the top displaying your main Categories titles. When your site visitors select My Book or Hobbies or any other Menu heading it will take them to a page that has all your blog posts for that category grouped together. That way your viewers can either read your blog in the format they already do, or they can choose one of your main categories and read all the posts that you wrote for that category.
I am sorry for the long answer here! :) I just wanted to try and give you options and see if any might work for you :) If any of it doesn’t make sense, please just say so and I’ll do my best to explain more clearly.
I hope this helps!
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