Trying out wordpress upgrade

• 

  datalaforge · Member · Mar 28, 2015 at 1:15 pm

  • Copy link
  • Add topic to favorites

  I’ve been happily blogging with wordpress for several years now and I’ve just started a business. I upgraded my blog for customization and got a domain name and I’m trying to get my blog posts to live in a separate page. When someone comes to my website, I’d like them to see a homepage featuring pages like, video, photo, blog, contact… with images associated with each link. Is this possible with wordpress.com? I’m having a real hard time getting this done.
  Thanks,
  Ryan

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

• 

  alexjgustafson · Member · Mar 29, 2015 at 5:30 pm

  • Copy link

  Hi Ryan!

  We can get this setup going for you. :) The first step is to make a Static front page instead of using your blog page as the front page. We have steps for this here:

  Front Page

  After you’ve followed those steps your site will now have a two static pages (‘Home’ and ‘About’) and a Posts page (named whatever you chose in step 5.) They’ll also appear in your menu, but we’ll worry about that later.

  Now that you have a static front page, your theme, Responsive, has a really cool homepage template for just this kind of setup, so we’ll use that to feature your images with links to the different sections.

  Edit your Home page and then look for the Page Attributes module. Using the Template dropdown, select ‘Home’. I’d also recommend adding some placeholder text (generate some here) into the page’s body, and setting a featured image (just for now, to see how this page template works.)

  Save that page by clicking the blue Update button.

  Now we need to create each section (Contact page, video, photo, etc).

  Add a new Page and call it Contact. Placeholder text might be a good idea here too. Later, you can add a Contact Form.

  The best way to link to all your videos and photos is to link to their Category Pages on your homepage. Visit your category settings here:

  https://datalaforge.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category

  Add new categories for ‘Video’ and ‘Photos’. Going forward, whenever you create a post that has a video in it make sure to add the category ‘Video’ and the same thing for ‘Photos.’

  Now, upload all your images for each section into your Media Library. Once you have that, we just need to add the images to your homepage.

  Visit your widget settings here:

  https://datalaforge.wordpress.com/wp-admin/widgets.php

  Add an Image Widget to the “Left Home” widget area. For the “Widget title” field, type in ‘Contact.’ For the “Image URL”, look at the image in your Media Library, copy its URL from the image information, then paste that URL here. Lastly, in “Link URL” field type in the link to your new Contact page: datalaforge.com/contact

  You’ll need to add new image widgets, just like that, for each section. Play around with how many you want in the “Left Home,” “Middle Home” and “Right Home” widget areas.

  Your Link URLs for the Category pages will be these:

  datalaforge.com/category/video

  datalaforge.com/category/photos

  Once you’ve got those setup, we can play around with the CSS to best handle your menu or how those images are displayed.

  Let me know if you hit any snags. :)

  -Alex G.

• 

  datalaforge · Member · Apr 25, 2015 at 4:36 pm

  • Copy link

  Alex,
  Thank you for your help! I’ve got something up and running. I am interested in tweaking some other things in the near future but for now, I’m pretty happy.
  Ryan

• 

  datalaforge · Member · Apr 25, 2015 at 4:42 pm

  • Copy link

  I have to say, the support here is strong. I didn’t even have a chance to try anyone else out because the wordpress staff has been so responsive while my queries to other platforms went unanswered.

• 

  siobhyb · Member · Apr 28, 2015 at 8:42 am

  • Copy link

  Thanks so much for your kind message! I’ve passed it along to our support team. :)