Creating Your Static Homepage

Pick up the FREE Checklist to go along with this guide. It gives you step-by-step instructions on how to set up your teaching website (and you’ll get some bonus advice too!)

Let’s now crack on and create our homepage. Some themes have the option of creating a homepage through their menu, but most of them you just create a page and change some settings.

So, create a page (see last section) and name it “Homepage.” Write a bit of content in there and use your theme’s shortcodes to make it look good. To make it your homepage do the following:

1. Under “Appearance” click on “Themes.”
2. Click on “customize”
3. Click on “Static Front Page” select the option, “Front page” and then choose your newly created Homepage. Click save and check to see if it all worked fine.

You can go back and tinker with this: Think about if you want a sidebar, what pictures might help (showing a picture of you helps you make it about you), and what information is important on your homepage.

Creating our navigation menu

Creating a menu is easy, just go to Appearance -> Menus and click Add New Menu. Name it “Navigation” and then under “Pages” on the left hand side choose your new Homepage, adding it to your menu. Rename it “Home” (or “HOME”). Save the menu.

Now in the top-right-hand corner choose “Navigation” as your new Main Navigation Menu and then save it.

In the future, when you add your new pages. You can have sub-menus by cascading your new pages, just like below:

WordPress Menu

Now it is time to take a look at sidebars and whether you feel one is necessary.