15.11.11

The Real Blogger Status: Make A Static Home Page For Your Blog

The Real Blogger Status: Make A Static Home Page For Your Blog

uesday, May 25, 2010

Make A Static Home Page For Your Blog

OK, everybody knows that, with a Blogger blog, you can't really make a static home page. That's one of the known limitations of Blogger blogs. The home page of a Blogger blog will contain the most recent posts - as specified by the Settings - Formatting "Show at most" value.

So, just don't show any posts on the main page. That's not a lot of work, really.
  1. In Settings - Formatting, set "Show at most" to 0 posts.
  2. Add a "Welcome" gadget, using an HTML / Text gadget. Or compose a "Welcome" gadget using Post Editor, if you want a really shiny static home page. You'll have a couple choices for positioning the new gadget.
    • If you want your Welcome gadget to look like a "Welcome" post, you can position it just above the Blog Posts gadget, and have the sidebar(s) visible.
    • If you want your Welcome gadget to look like a "welcome" header message,, you can position it just below the blog header, and have the sidebar(s) below it and not visible.
  3. Tweak the "Welcome" gadget, so it only displays on home page.
  4. Remove the Status Message code from the template, so your readers don't have to look at the "No posts were found which match your query" / "Showing posts with label" message (both messages are produced by the same code).
  5. Add a custom pages index, to index the pages and posts in this blog, and other blogs. You can have either true static pages - or you can have dynamic pages, using labels.
  6. You're done - check it out.

If you wish, look at my Static WebSite Test blog, and see how simple it is. Note that my example shows a linklist in the sidebar, with mostly links to other blogs. It's a separate task (no more complicated than this one) to create a menu bar for this blog, to index pages and posts in this blog.