Fairy Blog Mother
After I had completed my blogging visual e-course ‘Creating a front or index page’ which is the last link under my Free Resources library on the sidebar, I felt I needed to have a homepage of my own.
Both kinds of blog
I didn’t want to have the same ‘Welcome to XXX’ stuff that you see on so many websites, and I wanted to avoid the blurb that usually goes on about how wonderful the business is without any thought for the customers.
By putting your customers first, you’re supposed to write your copy using more ‘you’ rather than ‘I’ or ‘we’, but instead I’ve created an interview with questions and answers, concentrating on what the Fairy Blog Mother does and why she wants to help bloggers.
And I’ve peppered it with some testimonials that I felt would help reinforce my cause. (Incidently, if any of you want to give me some, I’ll gladly post them up!)
Right, how did I put up a homepage? The first thing, apart from deciding what to say, was to create a new page. (See my ‘Creating pages’ e-course on my sidebar.) Now in deciding what to put in the title field, I experimented using trial and error, bearing in mind that it would appear in my navigation bar at the top of my blog. Too long looked ridiculous, too short was meaningless. In fact I finally ended up a totally original ‘Homepage’!
Then I created my questions as images, and uploaded them into my images file in FileZilla. I could have put them into my media library (see ‘Putting in Pictures’) but I have hundreds of pictures on this blog and it’s easier to upload them in bulk into an image file. (I’ll write a post soon on how to do this.)
Each image has its attached answer, carefully edited so they fit the space accordingly.
After publishing this page, giving it a hierarchy of 1 so it appears at the beginning of the navigation bar, I created another empty page called ‘Blog’, gave it a hierarchy of 2 and also published it.
Now comes the clever bit. Going to ‘Settings > Reading’ you’ll notice the first section ‘Front page displays’. Click the ‘static page’ button and fill in the fields with your home and blog pages. There you’ll see evidence of my totally inadequate title and its consequences!
Look at the navigation bar at the top!
So I tried to amend the situation with a better title and another title (using the H1 tag) in the text body – culminating in the present solution.
But if you look in my navigation bar you’ll see two ‘Homes’, and I’m sure this could be corrected if I was techie enough to go behinds the scenes and play with the code, but instead this is why I changed it to the present ‘Homepage’ – a total cop out, but never mind, it works!
How to take away the comment boxes from your blog’s pages
Fairy Blog Mother
The fact that there are always default comment boxes in new pages has always bothered me, why are they there? Surely only posts should have comment boxes?
I suppose WordPress thought it would be good to have the possibility of commenting on a page’s content, but really it’s a pain as it looks terrible and most pages are created not to encourage comments – best leave that concept for the posts!
But now I have learned how to ‘turn them off’ in WordPress.com (and for technical folk how in WordPress.org) and as it’s so easy to do in the ‘free’ WordPress version, here’s how:
First, let’s look at a homepage with a comment box:
Now really you don’t want a comment box on your homepage, as it looks wrong. So let’s remove it. First, go to the Dashboard (see How to access a blog):
Go to ‘Pages’ in the left sidebar and click on ‘Pages’ below it:
When you mouse over the ‘Homepage’ link you’ll get an option called ‘Quick Edit’. Click on that:
Look for where it says ‘Allow Comments’ on the right side under ‘Default Template’ and click on it to turn it off:
Don’t forget to click ‘Update’. You’ll go back to the ‘Pages’ menu:
Click on ‘View’ to see your new Homepage:
There, doesn’t that look better without a comment box!
Now repeat the process for all the other pages where you don’t want a comment box, and enjoy a comment-box-on-pages-free blog!