Adding a selection of Pages can turn our WordPress site from a simple blog, to a fully-functioning course site. In this section, we will add a home page to our site, create a syllabus page from a Word document, and delete the WordPress sample page.
By default, our site's home page displays our ten most recent posts. While this is the desired format for a blog, it may be more appropriate for a course website to display a more traditional static home page.
To begin with, create a new page by hovering over Pages in the WordPress left sidebar and choose the Add New option. Title this new page Home by typing in the Enter title here text area. On this page, we can add content as desired, such as a brief summary of our class or any other information we wish to immediately convey.
We may also wish to include a link to our department or school website. To do so, type the text that will display as our link, such as For more information, visit our department's website.
To create a link, highlight the text that will become our link, and click on the Insert/Edit Link button (which appears as a chain link). This will open a modal box that will gray out the rest of the screen. Insert the full web address of the page you would like to link to in the link URL. The link Title is not required, but if the text link is not descriptive enough (such as a link where it simply says click here), a title can be greatly beneficial to students with disabilities who may use screen-reading software. For the Title, enter a simple, descriptive phrase, such as English Department Site. We may also check the Open link in a new window/tab checkbox, if we wish for students to remain on our site while visiting the link.
Once we are satisfied with our page, we may publish it by clicking on the blue Publish button.
Tip
Page order
As we create our site's pages, we will most likely want the home page to appear first in the site's navigation. By default, all pages are given an order of 0 and sorted alphabetically. Leaving our home page order at 0, we can then assign our other pages higher numerical values to organize our navigation. As we create the sample pages of our site, I will recommend a page order to reorganize the navigation order.
Though we have created a page titled Home, you may notice when previewing the site that our posts still act as the actual home page of our site.
In order to change this we must first create an empty page to hold our posts.
- Create a new page.
- Title the page something descriptive such as
Blog. - Leave the content of the page empty.
- Set the page order to
1, so that it is the second item in our navigation. - Click on the Publish button.
Once our empty Blog page has been created, we must adjust our site's Reading Settings to display a static home page.
- Hover over Settings and choose Reading.
- In the Front page displays option, select the A static page radio button.
- For the Front page, select the Home option from the drop-down menu.
- For the Posts page, select our empty Blog page.
Home will now appear as our site's static home page while our posts will appear on the Blog page.
One of the most common pages of any course site is the course syllabus. Most educators have written and formatted their syllabus in Microsoft Word or a similar Word processor. Using the Paste from Word feature of WordPress we can easily preserve our syllabus formatting.
To create our Syllabus page, hover over the + New button in the WordPress admin bar at the top of the screen and choose Page. This will take us to the New Page WordPress screen. Title the new page Syllabus by typing in the page title textbox.
To use Paste from Word:
From your Word processor, select and copy the appropriate text.
- In WordPress, click on the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button in the text editor.
- Click on the Paste From Word button that displays in the newly appeared second row.
- Paste the text into the Paste from Word textbox.
- Click on the Insert button.
While the Paste from Word feature will preserve much of the basic formatting of a Word document, the results are not always ideal. If the document requires cleaning up or is not being pasted directly from a Word document, the basic editing and formatting of posts act very similar to that of most Word processing applications. If in doubt, consult the WordPress support page for formatting in the visual editor (http://en.support.wordpress.com/visual-editor/).
Before publishing the page, set the Order to 2 so that it will appear after Home and Blog in our site's navigation.
Similar to our "Hello World" post, WordPress comes with a sample page (appropriately titled Sample Page). To delete this page from our site, hover over the Pages in the left sidebar, and select the All Pages option. WordPress will present us with a list of our site's pages. Hover over the Sample Page and choose the Trash option to delete it.