Setting my debut home page
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I’ve just purchased Debut for my site http://www.jennyalexander.co.uk but although I’ve read the forums and followed all the steps, I can’t get the front page template to set up the slider. All I’m getting is the normal blog page layout in my ‘edit page.’ Please help!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Jenny,
To get the slider to work, you’ll first need to set up the Home Page as described on the Debut support page here:
https://wordpress.com/themes/debut/support/
Here are the steps for that:
- Create a Page.
- Set it to use the Home Page page template
- Go to Settings -> Reading, set your “Front page displays” option to “Static Page”.
- Set the “Front Page” option to the Home page you created in Step 1 above
It looks like you’ve finished steps 1 and 2, so now you can change your reading settings (step 3) from your site’s dashboard here:
https://jennyalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-reading.php
Once that’s finished, you can start setting up the Debut theme’s slider with the instructions on the support page I mentioned above. If you run into any more trouble with that, you can contact the theme author directly in the Debut support forum here:
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Thank you for replying. I did all that repeatedly yesterday and have just done it again now. I have no idea what I should be seeing, never having yet managed to see anything different from my normal blog post template, but I imagine it should have areas where I can place images and text into the slider and featured posts positions. I’ve emailed the designer yesterday and he sent me to the forums, and tbh I’m feeling a bit pushed from pillar to post :(
I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or the theme just isn’t working.
Jen -
OK – I’ve just noticed that if I type stuff onto the template anyway and update, it isn’t appearing on my site. should I have activated it or something when I purchased the theme? I assumed when I bought it it would all be set ready to use
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Hi Jen,
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel that I wasn’t listening to your questions. I mentioned the Debut support forum because the theme author answers questions in that particular forum, and he is best suited to answer questions about how his theme works (or investigate any problems that might come up). However, I’ll do my very best to help you here!
The Hero Slider for this theme needs a little setup, to make sure it’s displaying the content you want it to display. Once you finish the initial setup, you’ll be able to just publish new posts and have them automatically added to the slider.
First, you will need to create a new Category to use with your slider. Any post with that category will be featured in your slider. You can create new categories under Posts > Categories in your site’s dashboard here:
https://jennyalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
Once you’ve created that category, you can configure the slider settings under Appearance > Theme Options in your site’s dashboard here:
https://jennyalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/wp-admin/themes.php?page=debut
In the “Hero Slider” section, you’ll need to choose the category you set up before. You can also make other adjustments to how the slider works.
Finally, you’ll need to create the content to go in that slider. The slider uses Posts from your blog — any posts with the featured category you set up earlier will be automatically added to your slider.
If you add a Featured Image (that’s at least 940×350 pixels) to each post, that image will appear as the post’s background in the slider.
I know that’s a lot of information at once, so please let me know if you have questions about any of those steps. :)
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Hi Rachel – thank you for this – it’s really helpful. Before I try to follow your instructions, I wonder if you could advise me whether it will actually be possible for me to create the site I want with this theme? It’s a website rather than a blog, rather in the style of this one http://www.nicolamorgan.com with the slider just announcing the various things I do and the grid below linking through to the various pages of my website – children’s books, workshops etc. If I know it’s possible, I’ll get stuck in. Many thanks.
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Hi Jen,
If you create each of the announcements and other pieces of your site as Posts rather than Pages, they will create a layout like the one on the Debut demo site: http://debutdemo.wordpress.com/
It won’t be exactly like the website you mentioned, but it will create the slider and grid that you see in the demo there. (The Debut theme specifically creates that layout out of posts, but there’s no reason you need to have a blog to do that. You can just publish your site’s content as posts and the theme will create that layout for you.)
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