Creating a Landing Page in WordPress

Posted by Gabe on January 20, 2010 under Social Media, Wordpress | 2 Comments to Read

I have been hearing a lot of talk about “landing pages” lately.  You can make one for Twitter, for Facebook and even your blog.  These are pages that provide a first impression when a user “lands” on your site.  Well today I set out to find out how to have one on my blog.  I’ve always felt that the directory of posts I provide would be a great landing page, instead of the most recent post I have written.  I write about a lot of different things and this directory will help the reader find something that is of most interest to him or her.

So I searched the web for “landing page in WordPress”.  The links that came up most told me I had to change my theme.  That didn’t cut it for me.  After a bit of digging, I found the solution buried in WordPress help, and was excited that it is rather simple to accomplish.  Here are the steps to create a landing page for WordPress:

1) Create the landing page itself as you would a normal page.

2) Create another blank page and call it “Blog”.

3) On your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings…Reading. Right there you see you have a choice of ‘Your latest posts’ or ‘A static page’.  Select ‘static page’ and choose the landing page you just created.  Just underneath that, under ‘Posts page’ choose the blank page you just created, ‘Blog’. 

Your theme should automatically add that page to your header. Now when you go to your main blog site, you should see the landing page you created.  When you click on the ‘Blog’ page you will see all your posts as you used to.  For an example, see how it is implemented here: http://www.justgabe.com  Good luck!