If you are new to building websites you should know that there are a ton of services and software packages out their to help you build a site or blog. Joomla and WordPress are two of my favorites. Their both free, and both are fairly easy to use. Joomla is commonly used for sites, and WordPress is commonly used for blogs.

WordPress is Not Just for Blogs

juiceA common disbelief though is that WordPress is only for blogs. Well you can build a website with WordPress, and you can have as many pages as you want, just don’t expect a content management system (CMS) to manage it as if you were using Joomla. WordPress is great for creating quick information sites like this Power Juicer Review site. It’s easy to change your templates, new pages get automatically added to your menu, you can control the order of the pages, and even have the pages follow a tree in navigation.

Making WordPress Appear as a Site

So if you have ever tried WordPress, you may be wondering how do I make the home page show only my home page, and not all of my blog posts. It’s actually very easy. Under Settings, look for Reading Settings. After you find that all you have to do is select a static page for front page displays, and then select the page you want to use as that home page (assuming you already made one).

settings

It’s that easy. When creating your page you simply use Pages instead of Posts, and within the edit page you can select what order you what the page and its hiarchy.

If you are going to add pages to a WordPress site regardless of it’s format make sure you do pay attention to the page order function. By default pages are ordered alphabetically, but if you want you can change the order by simply giving them a numeric value. This setting is found when you edit a page under Attributes. If you look at the Power Juice site again you will see the Power Juicer Pro page on the bottom of the menu. They have the two most important pages on the top, and is clearly not alphabetized. They are making used of the custom order, and a basic website well done using the power of WordPress.

Jan 302009
 

template

Instant website coming up. Building a website doesn’t have to be a major production. Can you say website templates?  If you are looking to start a new site, whether it be made from scratch, WordPress, Joomla, or whatever, there are ton of templates out there to get your site up and running in no time. Where are there a ton of them? The Template Kingdom.

Template Kingdom has a variety of templates. You can find Joomla templates, CSS, WordPress, and simple website templates. They have nearly fifty different categories to choose from, and most of them have over fifty or more different templates within. I found this looking for some Joomla templates for myself. For those of you unaware of Joomla, it’s kind of like WordPress in ease of setting up, but it is designed for websites, not blogs. Building a CMS site is the way to go these days, and using Joomla combined with a pre-designed template can certainly make things easier.

Template King offers a variety of free, and paid templates, and if you are template designer they are looking for you!

Author Note: Unfortunately the site has been down for several days so I removed the links in April 2009.