WordPress, the software that powers this site, was originally intended to be a blogging platform. Readers come to a WordPress site and see all the posts listed in descending chronological order. However, given WordPress’ ease of installation and use, and the huge selection of themes and plug-ins available, a lot of people have started to use WordPress as a “regular” website for their small business or band or what have you.
Which brings up an interesting question. While it’s easy to have WordPress use a page as a “home page” instead of displaying your most recent posts… how do you then link back to your blog posts?
Let me give an example: say you want to use WordPress to create a website for your band. You create a page called “Home”, and additional pages called “Music”, “Videos”, “Reviews” and “Shop”. But you also want to have a “News” page which contains timely posts using the blog system WordPress is famous for. But how do you link to that? WordPress doesn’t offer an intuitive way to do this.
Thankfully, the solution is pretty easy.
The first step is to create and publish a blank page. You’ll probably find that WordPress won’t let you publish a completely blank page; if so, just click the HTML tab in the text editor and type
This is a non-breaking space, so the page will look empty, but will contain a tiny bit of code so WordPress doesn’t complain about it being blank. Give this page a title like “News” or “Blog”, then continue with the next step.
Log in to the admin portion of your site if you haven’t already. Then click Settings > Reading:
If you’re running in standard “blog mode” the top radio button will be selected (“Your Latest Posts”). Change this to “A static page”, and choose “Home” as your front page (or whichever page you want as your home page) and then choose “News” (or whichever blank page you saved in the previous step) as your posts page.
Assuming you have a normal setup where all pages are included in the page hierarchy, you’ll then see a “News” link on your home page. Here’s a link in the default Twenty Ten theme:
Visitors to your site can simply click “News” to see all your blog posts, in reverse chronological order as you’d expect.