Turn Your WordPress Blog into a Business Website
August 4, 2009 by Spencer Spellman · 23 Comments 
It’s no mystery that WordPress in many respects has taken over the blogosphere. The popularity of the Wordpress software has driven many people to use it as not just a blog, but for business sites as well.
Did you know that you can turn your WordPress blog into a full-service website for your business or company? Maybe you’re a technology blogger and now want to expand your blog to offer web design services and software. Typically business sites include more pages than posts, so it’s simply a matter of how you organize and present content.
This Wordpress tutorial will walk you through turning your blog into a website. With a few simple steps you can create a dynamic website that is easy to maintain and update, yet still keep that “static” look user have come to expect from traditional html-drive business sites.
Right now, your blog probably looks like the following below, but just with more posts.
Now, instead of having blog posts, you can turn your main page into a true home page. You’ll begin by going to the “pages” section of your WordPress dashboard.
Once here, you can add text, video, photos or html code to serve as what people see when they come to your home page.
Once you do this and publish it, the page will not automatically show up on your home page. To change this to your home page, you now have to go back to your Dashboard and go to “reading”, which is located under the settings tab on the left side bar.
Once there, you’ll choose to make the page of your choice into a static page.
Now if you click on your website, it’ll display the page that you marked as the front page.
Once you’ve done this, you can now add more pages to your website, and move your blog to another part of your site. To add another page, just go back to the pages section of the dashboard and name the page and put in the information you want (html, text, photos, videos, etc.) and publish it.
You’ll notice that this time, you don’t have to go to settings, but that the page immediately shows up on your website under the appropriate heading. Depending on your theme, your pages will now be posted under the names of the different pages at the top of your website or along the sidebar.
With the exception of your front page, your pages will now be arranged alphabetically, unless you change the order of their appearance.
To change the order of their appearance, you’ll go into each page and give it a number.
And now with that, you’ve turned your blog into a full website.
Sounds good and have tried this. What I would like is for the static pages to be in the root (www.example.com/static-page-1/) but for blog posts to be in a subdirectory (www.example.com/blog/post-1/). How would I achieve that ? Any thoughts ?
Thanks
@Roger what you are asking sounds like a simple case of permalink hacking. Following the permalink structure. once you make a static home page, and a page for your blog posts. You want to go to your settings and permalinks tab. you will be given a radio button list of permalink structures, at the bottom of the list is custom. you want to select that button and in the space type ” /NAME OF BLOG PAGE/%postname%”. in the test I did on my local test site I used a page named blog so mine looks like – /blog/%postname% and that will get your static pages at example.com/whatever and blog posts at example.com/blog/whatever hope that helps
Wordpress is better for professional sites than most CMS out there now. With how customizable it has become, my clients are now demanding wordpress over Joomla(in Chicago, that’s actually a big deal).
That being said, I have to learn more of wordpress to satisfy their needs.
That was a nice, quick tutorial. Once of the things I’ve found is that there’s quite a bit you can do with WordPress page templates. They’re pretty powerful and flexible.
@Roger – one thing to realize is that none of these pages are really static. I think that Eck0’s method would likely work, although I’ve gotta ask – what’s the value in the putting blog posts under a pretend blog folder?
@michael short answer why not?… but if i was to do this on a live site it would only be for sanity sake. so the client sees that the post are on the blog page.
Hi,
Nice tutorial on using WordPress as a Website. I have been using pages more than posts on my website. I would like to contribute some points to this post.
Users of WordPress is able to create a home.php page, which can be designed totally different from page.php to use as a custom homepage. WordPress will automatically accept home.php as the homepage because of template hierarchy.
Users can also create different page templates, such as one for about, which may have a custom resume and graphics.
Lastly for the order of page appearance, users can code a simple CSS drop menu using WordPress wp_page_menu function and arrange it using the page number order and tagging of sub pages to parent pages.
Hope my information is useful,
Regards,
Denzel
1) Is it possible to turn off ‘comments closed’ note on static pages and
2) how to display categories on blog page side bar only please.
thanks, this is a great tutorial.
I tried diferent themes and in the pages list there is not a home page, but of course it appears in the Menu bar. If I create a new page “Home Page” then I will have 2 home pages in the Menu bar. I can change one to be the static front page. Then the other one can be a Blog page, but it will be static too and not a real post page.
Eck0 – thanks for your suggestion about how to create a ’subdirectory’ for blog posts. Sounds good to me
Michael – The reason I wanted to do this was more cosmetic I suppose. Just to be clear which are pages and which are posts.
Looks like the basics of choosing the homepage are included here, but I’d say there are numerous additional items that could be added – perhaps in a follow-up post.
Some suggestions:
– Designating the new Blog homepage/section
– Adding/Editing/Removing your home links placement in the appropriate DIV tag
– Turning on/off comments on Pages vs. Posts
Another useful tool to include when building your business website using WordPress is the “hide pages from navigation” plugin that helps you block certain pages from appearing in menus. You might have a variety of reasons to do so and this tool gives you the means.
We tend to use a more traditionally designed, custom index.php home page with custom Wordpress loops, then use the standard Wordpress loops on the page.php (Pages) and single.php (Posts) pages. For sub-themes, use the archive.php page. This is useful when you need a third type of layout for a set of pages. Just select the sub-theme when editing your page or post. We are currently using Wordpress 2.8.3.
I too am trying to make by blog look more like my stellaguide.com website. I changed the template, but having trouble editing or removing an ABOUT section on the right side bar. Since I am new to wordpress, is there anywhere that I can go for a “manual” to help out more. Or does anyone know how to get into that part of the backend so I can edit this sidebar ABOUT part. http://blog.stellaguide.com
Thank you so very much. Oh and it is the Wordpress 2.8.3
Hey guys, please help. How do I password protect my pages in wordpress 2.8.3? Thanks
There are more and more web developers selling Wordpress-sites to companies and I think we will see even more of it in the future. Thanks to Wordpress it takes just a few minutes to set up a complete web site with all the basic functions. Instead of having to create your own CMS you can simple use free plugins, free themes, etc.
Very rightly said this is what i did at my website also very nice tutorial here indeed!!!
By doing some modifications to your header.php, you can “add” menu items that connect to the site’s blog. You can check how this works here: http://innergameofstress.com – where both a main blog and a blog to post press releases is available.
Hello Josepg,
You have made two categories that is it what is so heavy about it?
Please tell me. Displaying categories in menu is normal thing.
Sam.
Great article, is is useful, thanks for sharing.
@Josepg My friend your site is running very slow,what web hosting do you use?
I have one question.Can I post an article on a specific page or category but not this post display on my home page?
I would like to set up a website using a blog–for example www.nameofsite.com. I’m not understaning how to do that–i don’t want www.nameofsite.com/blog or http://nameofsite.com. This site for example when you go home page it’s a website however, I believe this is a wordpress template. Please advise.
Excellent posting . This will be helpful who want to make their blog site like general website. It is more useful for creating business portofolio.
Thanks great help those who are new to wordpress themes.
This is a great tutorial. Everytime I build a site, I’m amazed at how flexible wordpress really is.
I think that wordpress has so much support, it’s ridiculous not to consider it for a business website. I’ve built 4 wordpress business sites since they made updates so much easier.