blogability

If you’d like your blog to look more like a conventional website, Wordpress software (used by both Wordpress and Edublogs blogs) allows you to create static pages alongside your blog posts page. For this it’s best to choose a theme (or page template) that has a sidebar menu. You can change your theme in the Site Admin menu under Presentation.

To create pages in Wordpress or Edublogs, choose Write from the site admin menu then Write page.

When you publish a page, it will appear in your sidebar menu under Pages. (If you do not see ‘Pages’ in your side menu, go to Presentation and sidebar widgets and move the ‘Pages’ option into the menu area.)

Please note that Blogger blogs do not have the pages feature.

Creating a Static Home Page

If you want a personal website, you may prefer visitors to arrive at a ‘home page’ with information that doesn’t change rather than at your blog posts page. To do this, first of all write a page and call it something like ‘Home’ and publish it (don’t worry too much about the content. You can change it later if you wish).
Now you can tell the blog to make this the page that readers see first. On a Wordpress blog this is very easy. On Edublogs there’s an extra step.

Instructions for Wordpress:

• Choose Options, Reading and under ‘Front page displays’, select ‘a static front page’
• In the front page box select Home (or the name of your chosen page),
• in the posts page box select Posts
  
• Update Options

When you view your site, you’ll see that the home page displays first, with a link to the posts page on the pages menu.

Instructions for Edublogs:

• First of all write a page called ‘Posts’ but leave it blank.
• Publish this page.
• Now follow the instructions for Wordpress.

(If you don’t include this step in Edublogs, your posts will be lost to the world!)

More page features

When you write or edit a page, there are options to the right of the screen that you may wish to change. Click on the + sign to see what’s there.

Discussion – if you don’t want comments on a page, untick the box

Page password – create a page that’s only seen by, say, team members

Page parent – unless you specify otherwise, all pages will be listed on one level. If you have a bigger site and want a hierarchical structure, this is how you set it up. (You can see from the menu that this page is a sub-page of FAQ).