MindSpinner

This weekend finds me feverishly working on behalf of a friend to use WordPress both as the basis for a website and a blog, in order to speed the creation the site and to make it easy for my friend to manage both.

I am not a sufficiently good geek (I am no geek at all, alas) to figure out how to implement the static home page plug-in available for WordPress, at least within the time limits I have. I followed directions after downloading it, created a page called home.php, and found to my horror that it did not hold hands with the style sheet intended to format it. The results were predictably ugly. No doubt SOS queries could be sent to WordPress users and in a week or so, with the help from here and there, I would have this conundrum conquered, but I don’t have a week. I have this morning.

So this is what I’m doing. I’m installing a blog of identical design in two places, at the root level of the domain and in a subdirectory called “blog.” The pages of the website to reside at www.whatever.com, are “pages,” not “posts,” except that the home page is both a page and a post so that it appears permanently on the sidebar and as the content of the page. No more posts are to be written on this blog, so that the “home page” post stays put. I’ll pull out the bits of code that pull up categories and dates and comments. I have figured out enough to manage that.

The second blog, at www.whatever.com/blog/, will function as the blog, with links to whatever.com website pages in the sidebar and via navigational buttons at the top. Comments and categories will appear in their appointed places. The whole thing will look pretty seamless and will be easy to manage.

No doubt there are better ways to proceed for those who have time and know-how, but for now, this workaround looks good to me.