“How To Create A Website (Not A Blog) With WordPress” by Geoff Blake, TenTonOnline.com

“How To Create A Website (Not A Blog) With WordPress” by Geoff Blake, http://TenTonOnline.com

Full-length course here : http://www.tentononline.com/how-to-build-websites-not-a-blog-with-wordpress/

Free WordPress Guide: http://www.tentononline.com/wpguide

Transcription:

Hey, what’s going on? This is Geoff Blake from tentononline.com and in this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a website (not a blog) using WordPress. This is something that a lot of people want to know how to do with their WordPress site. So the objective here is to turn off the blog “look and feel”, if you will, of their WordPress site and create a more traditional looking and behaving website.

Now, before we really dive into it, I’ve put together a free WordPress guide to go along with this video, which you can go and pick up over at tentononline.com/wpguide. So, pause the video and go and grab your free guide now.

Alright, now, as I say, the objective here is to turn the blog look and feel off. I’m running just a straight up fresh installation of WordPress here, really nothing too exciting happening here.

We might want to start things off with a theme that doesn’t have a blog feel to it. Here I’m using the default 2013 theme just to demonstrate and much of what I’m going to show you is going to work for a lot of other themes but you may want to use a more website-y feel-y theme, if that makes sense to you. Maybe a theme like “Responsive” or “Business lite” or “Hatch”. These are all good examples of WordPress themes that have more of a traditional website feel to them.

Alright, now, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to take sort of a top-down approach to converting what I am seeing here into more of a traditional site and I’m going to start off right at the very top, “My Blog” and then “My WordPress Blog”.

So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to flip over to the back end of my WordPress site which I have here in another browser tab. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to head all the way down to “Settings” down towards the bottom left corner and then over to “General”. Okay. And inside the “General” screen I can change the “Site Title” and the “Tagline”. This is where we see “My Blog” and “My WordPress Blog”.

So, give me a second here. I’m going to change this to, just as a quick example here, “My Company Site”, something like this, and then perhaps the tagline for my company, “The Fastest Widgets in Town”. There we go. Something like that. I’m going to scroll all the way down towards the bottom and make sure that I save my changes and then I’ll head back to the front end of my site and refresh, Control or Command “R” on your keyboard, by the way, and there we go! Now we’ve gotten rid of that reference to a blog or to a WordPress website in the main header area, at least.

Alright, good enough. Now, the next thing I want to do is I want to change what’s being displayed in the front end of my WordPress website. By default we’re going to get our, what’s referred to as the WordPress Loop, all of our WordPress posts. I’m going to change that to a static page instead, which I would definitely recommend that you do.

So, with the default installation of WordPress we have one sample post which we just saw in the front end of our site and one sample page as well. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to head back down to “Settings” in the bottom left corner. This time I’m going to go to “Reading” and inside the “Reading Settings”, “Front page displays”, instead of my latest blog posts, I’m going to say “A static page” and the “Front page” I’m going to set to that default “Sample Page” that we have, okay? Go ahead and save those changes as well, okay?

Let’s go and check out the front end of our site. Once again I’ll refresh, Control or Command “R” on my keyboard. There we go. We now have a static page being displayed in the front end of our WordPress site, okay?

However, if I scroll down a little bit, I see that we have a commenting area down towards the bottom of this static page. Now, you may want to remove this comment area because, again, it’s kind of giving it sort of a blog-y feel, if that’s a term I can use.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go and turn off the commenting capabilities. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to head back once again to the back end of my WordPress site. I’m going to head down to “Pages” now. Go ahead and click on “Pages” and then there’s my sample page. I’m going to go and edit my actual sample page for a moment here, okay? Get in there. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to disable my commenting and here’s how I’m going to do it.

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Would you like to learn more about WordPress and how to build WordPress websites? Head to http://www.tentononline.com/wordpress for more!

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