www.reflectingthedesigner.com

Based on a comment I received earlier today, I thought I should do this post. Many people think that WordPress can only be used for blogs, or that you need to know some complicated code in order to turn your current WP blog into a full site. Both of these statements couldn’t be further from the truth. This site is a perfect example of that, and here are a few simple things you can do to turn your WP blog into a full blown site.

• Create a static home page
  - This is so simple! Just create a page that you want to be your home page and publish it.
  - Next, create a blog that you want your regular posts to be located on and publish that page as well.
  - Thirdly, on click on the Reading button under Settings on your Dashboard and choose to make your home display a static page. Just choose the page you created for the static page and choose the page you created to display posts for well…your posts.
• Label your blog something other than “blog” if you don’t necessarily want a typical blog as part of your site. Here are a few examples.
  - Resources or Products: if you offer services or items that you want to display based on category. You can create a page for each category as well, and your main Resources or Products page will display all of your posts.
  - News: use more like a blog to display your latest news. You can always choose to display only 1 or a few posts at a time, as well so that only the newest post is displayed like a regular page.
  - A specific theme. If you only update information on a very specific topic, than label your blog posts page that: movies, music, photos, etc.
• Use the text widget to create a graphic image or images on one or both sidebars. All you need to do is upload the desired image to your site, than copy and paste some code into the text widget. Let me know if you have any questions on this.
• Use the Display Widgets plugin from WP which allows you to hide and show widgets on only certain pages (note that this only works with the standard widgets as well as any text/image widgets you add).
• Make links from your pages with the Page Links To plugin from WP. This does just what it says; it allows you to create a page and link it to any address desired. For example, if you want to make a page out of specific categories, simply click on that category and copy and paste the url into the page link you want that page name to be.
• Other simple ideas include removing the words “Archive” from when displaying pages that are archives of posts, including a graphic signature to your home page. You can find out how to do these in previous posts of mine.
• Add a small store through your PayPal account by adding buy now or add to cart buttons by products you post to your site. All transactions are done through PayPal which is super easy and convenient for you. The buttons can be created completely through PayPal and you’ll get the exact code to copy and paste onto your pages. You can also use the E-Commerce plugin, but I’d recommend using this only if you have a more extensive store as it takes more work to set up and takes more space up on your site.

There are a ton of other things you can do, but those are the quickest and easiest ways to turn your blog into a site! Please let me know if this was helpful or if you have any more questions on turning your WordPress Blog into a regular website. also, contact me if you are interested in a completely original and customized WordPress theme design with setup.

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