Spiffin’ Your Home Page

You’ll want your home page to capture people immediately while inviting them explore and to return. There are many ways to go about that, and we hope that the UMW.EDU theme provides everyone with enough flexibiity to be able to accomplish this in their own way. There are two basic ways to do this in WordPress:

History and American Studies Home Page

The department of History and American studies chooses to keep their home page content fresh by using the default display of posts.

List of Your Current Blogs

You may have noticed that the home page, by default, will have a sample snippet of a blog post on it. This is the WordPress default — remember, WordPress began only a blogging platform. Many departments will want to keep with this default. What’s nice about it is that it puts your current activities at the top of the list and keeps your home page content from becoming dead and static. It makes what is happening now the most important thing, almost like a rolling newsletter. You can spiff it up with side navigation and widgets, and you’re done (as long as you remember to keep posting new content very regularly).

Provost Home Page

The Provost's page has a more conventional landing page approach. Widgets below the slideshow can rotate content on a regular basis.

Static Page

Others may not be comfortable, right off the bat, with committing to regular posting. They may want to have their home page feel more like a landing page, and post announcements (as blog posts) on a sporadic basis, and display them in widgets. Perhaps you’ll want a large slideshow or some welcome text, or something more conventional. This is also possible, but requires more work at the outset.

Let’s explore these two home page approaches, Blog and Static page, in the remainder of this section.