Step 13: The Home Page & News Area

Our home page is still looking pretty bare – and we don’t really want to be greeting people with “Hello World”, so the first thing we’re going to do is remove the “Hello world” post that’s always automatically installed with WordPress.

Once you’ve logged in to your WordPress admin area, the first thing to do is click the Posts link in the menu on the left. This will display all the news posts currently in your site (which at the moment is “Hello World”). Posts differ from Pages in that they are intended to be “blog” posts – but for all intents and purposes, we’re going to call them news items.

To delete the “Hello World” post, put your mouse over the title. The Edit, Quick Edit, Trash and View options will appear – click the Trash link to remove the post.

Right! Now to add a post (or news item). Click on the Add New link under the Posts admin menu.

Type in a heading and some content for your first post.

It’s good practice to categorize your posts. To do this click on the Add New Category link, type in the category name and click the Add button. In this example I’ve given my category the generic name “News”, but you might add categories such as “New Products”, “Industry News”, “Awards”, etc.

Once you’ve added a category, it will automatically appear ticked in the Categories list. Remember next time you add a post to tick the category you want your post to appear in.

To preview your news post, click the Preview button. The Preview button lets you see what the post is going to look like in you website without actually making the post publicly viewable.

Once you’re happy with your content, click the Publish button to post the new post to the home page of your website.

You can now view the live post on your website by clicking the View Post link.

Viewing your post you’ll notice there’s a Leave a Reply box down the bottom. This is so visitors can leave a comment on your post (yep, it’s the web, it’s interactive). You may not always want this to appear so move on to the next step and I’ll show you how to turn off “Comments”. Click the back button in your browser to get back to the admin area.

To stop people leaving comments on your blog, scroll down the Post Edit page a little and you’ll find the Discussion area. Un-check the Allow Comments and Allow Trackbacks and Ping-backs by clicking on the boxes to remove the ticks. Make sure you click the Update button once you’re finished.

Now click on the View Post Link to admire your hard work.