Creating a Static Front Page for Your WordPress Website

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Cory Miller, Kevin Palmer, Andrea Rennick, and Michael Torbert from WordPress All-in-One For Dummies

Creating a front page for your WordPress website is a three-step process: Create a static page, designate that static page as the front page of your site, and tweak the page to look like a website, rather than a blog.

By using this method, you can create unlimited numbers of static pages to build an entire website. You don’t even need to have a blog on this site, unless you want one.

To have a static page appear on the front page of your site, you need to create that page:

Click Add New in the Pages drop-down list.

The Add New Page page opens, where you can write a new page for your WordPress blog.
In the Title text box, type a title for the page.
Type the content of your page in the large text box.
Set the options for this page.
Click the Publish button.

The page is saved to your database and published to your WordPress site with its own, individual URL (or permalink). The URL for the static page consists of your blog URL and the title of the page. For example, if you titled your page About Me, then the URL of the page is http://yourdomain.com/about-me.
Click Reading in the Settings drop-down list to display the Reading Settings page.
In the Front Page Displays section, select the A Static Page radio button.
From the Front Page drop-down list, select the static page that you want to serve as your front page.

A Welcome page is a good choice for a static front page.
Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Reading Settings page.

WordPress displays the page you selected in Step 8 as the front page of your site.

Before you publish a new page to your site, you can change options to use different features available in WordPress. These features are similar to the ones available for publishing posts:

Custom Fields: Custom fields add extra data to your page, and you can fully configure them.
Discussion: Decide whether to let readers submit comments through the comment system by selecting or deselecting the Allow Comments text box. By default, the box is checked; uncheck it to disallow comments on this page.

Typically, you don’t see a lot of static pages that have the Comments feature enabled because pages offer static content that doesn’t generally lend itself to a great deal of discussion. There are exceptions, however, such as a Contact page, which might use the Comments feature as a way for readers to get in touch with the site owner through that specific page.
Author: If you’re running a multi-author site, you can select the name of the author you want to be attributed to this page.
Publish: Set the publishing and privacy options for your post.
Page Attributes: Select a parent for the page you’re publishing.
Page Template: You can assign the page template if you’re using a template other than the default one.
Page Order: By default, this option is set to 0 (zero). You can enter in a number, however, if you want this page to appear in a certain spot on the page menu of your site.
Featured Image: If you’re using a theme that uses an image to represent each post you have on your blog, you can easily define a post’s thumbnail by clicking the Set Featured Image link below the Featured Image module on the Add New Post page. Then you can assign an image that you’ve uploaded to your site as the featured image for a particular post.