Does newbie blunder make a static home page impossible?
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I’m totally new to this and unfortunately, very early on I deleted the welcome post. Now I have a “Home” page (with a HOME tab) which I cannot mangage as I would like to.
It tells me “sorry, what you’re looking for is not there”. I can add posts to this page. But I cannot edit the page or create a static page.
Of course, I can create an alternative HOME page to look exactly how I want it to. But I then have two HOME tabs, which looks confusing as well as ugly.
I’ve read the FAQs and searched the forums and found some techie stuff, which seems to say I can’t do anything about this. Given the great things that can be done with WordPress, it seems strange that such an obvious newbie mishap can’t be undone.
Can anyone give me simple answers to a couple of my newbie questions?
1 – Is there anyway to edit the original Home page and create a static page? If so, how?
2 – If this is not possible, is there any way to set my blog back to the original (factory?) settings – ie, start completely from scratch? If so, how?
3 – If I can’t do either of the above, is there any (simple) way to change the name of the original Home tab so that it is called something else?
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The original post was just that, a blog post and placeholder. It’s not the whole blog itself, although it appears that way at the start. Deleting it is a normal thing to do, but yes, it does cause problems. The way to fix them is just to make a regular blog post, which then goes in and fills up some space so that people don’t get a 404 error or anything when trying to click on it. Just something quick, even just a “Hi there” and picture, should work fine.
To set a static page is not difficult. First, you have to write one. Do this same as you would for a blog post (Dashboard –>Write) but you’ll see two tabs above the white space for typing: the Write Post tab, which will be selected, and the Write Page tab, which won’t be. Click on the Write Page one, and whatever you type will become a static page.
To set that page as the front of your blog, you go to Dashboard –> Options –> Reading and indicate the proper page for it to be the start page.
The HOME tab will always lead back to the blog posts in any theme that has the tab automatically. The blog page is considered to be the heart of the blog, and where most people always want to be. You can switch to a theme that doesn’t display tabs and call your static page HOME if you want, which would be my suggestion, or if you know CSS you could buy the CSS upgrade and change what the HOME tab says to BLOG or something.
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Re-reading, you say you cannot edit that post? You can’t edit something you’ve deleted. But the Home link shouldn’t go to that post per se; it should go to the blog page as a whole. Can you give us a link to the blog so we can check it out? There may well be a bug there.
If you’re talking about clicking on the Hello World title in the Recent Posts widget in your sidebar…sidebars take a few minutes to a few hours to update, so don’t worry, it will vanish from there quickly enough.
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I’ve created the Posts page you needed, and if you look in Options > Reading you can see the two pages for Front / Posts.
That helps?
Create the pages you do want, then change the Options > Reading page and only then delete what I did to save it happening again.
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The ‘Front’ page is a child of the Posts page – look on the right when editing it – so that keeps it hidden from the top tabs.
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Wow. Thanks both. Amazing quick responses.
Raincoaster – that was very helpful and will be extremely useful to me as I grope my way around!
Mark – thanks for that reset. Brilliant!
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