How to Add a Blog to Your Website

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today’s tutorial is about how to add a blog to your website.

Now some of you may not know what I mean by this. Well, what I mean is that if you have a website and you don’t want the blog that you’ve created or are going to create to be the front page of that website, what you want to do is make a separate entity of that website. So it would be a link you can click that will bring you to your blog.

Now to go about doing this, there are a few things that you want to do. First, you want to come to your Pages link on the navigation menu. And when you open that up, you’re going to click “Add New.” This will bring you to the Add New Page. What you’re going to do here is in this title text box, you’re going to type in “Blog.” Then in your post text box or page text box, rather, you’re going to leave this blank.

Finally, you’re going to publish your post. Now the reason you leave this box blank is because WordPress automatically sets the page slug to /blog, and I’ll show you what I mean in a second. After you’ve published it, what you want to do is… Well, you’ll notice that here, on the page I just created, it’s an empty blog page. So I want to change a few settings so that my posts will appear on this page.

So I come over to the Reading Settings page. This, you can find in your navigation menu if you follow my mouse. You open up the Settings link, and you scroll down to Reading. And now you don’t want to check this option where it says “Your latest posts” because that means your front page is going to display that, and you don’t want your blog posts to be your front page.

So what you’re going to do is choose a static page. Next, you’ll choose what page you want to be your front page. So I will make it the “About Us at BuildMySiteForFree.com.” So this will show… when viewers actually type in my URL link, this is the page that is going to be the first page they see.

And now Post page is where I’m going to choose the page I just created, which is “Blog.” So now this is going to be a separate link on my front page, “About Us at BuildMySiteForFree.com.” There are a few other options you could choose here that you may have seen in our Reading Settings video. You could just change how many posts you want shown on the page, how many items you want, whether or not you want them to be shown in full text or, rather, a summary. And then finally, you want to always make sure you save your changes at the end.

Now let’s see what we just did. So here I am, on my speedyeti.com website. And as you notice, our front page is the About Us at BuildMySiteForFree.com. Now, if you also notice, a separate page, which we just created, is right here. So when we click that link, it’s going to bring us to our blog page with all of the posts that we have already created.

And that is how you make it separate from your front page. And to show you what I meant by the slug is if you look at, on the top where you type in a website, or if you come right here and look on your Edit Page, you will notice that this is the permalink that is now set for that page. It’s going to be your domainname.com/blog. So if people just want to see your blog rather than your website, they can type in this link right here that you have created.

And this is how you add a blog to your website. Thank you for watching.

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About the Author

Andy Johnson

Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.