Moving a Blog to the Home Page of Your Website

Reader Question:

Hey Brandon quick question for you i just started my own website its all sports related called http://www.sportsworldchat.com and i also started a blog thru wordpress which appears at www.sportsworldchat.com/blog however i wanted the blog to appear on the front page of my normal website page not a separate page, any idea how to do this? I want them to be together where someone is reading my blog and says oh they have sports forums here let me type in there. Ive only been doing this 3days so really any info would be great since im not too deep into this, thanks.

Brandon’s Feedback:

Hey Steve. If I understand you correctly, you want the blog to appear as the home page of your website. That’s easy enough — you would just install the WordPress program into the root folder of your website. Right now, you have your web forum in the root directory of your site, so that’s what people see when they visit the home page. They see the forum.

If you would rather have the blog appear there instead, you would basically have to reverse the way you have things set up now. For instance, you would have to move the forum into its own sub-folder (such as sportsworldchat.com/forum/) and then reinstall the WordPress program to your root / main directory.

After reading through your question again, it seems you want people to see both the forum and the blog when they reach the home page. Unfortunately, you will have to decide which program you want to reside in the root folder — the blog or the forum. You can’t have them both there, because you can only have one home page.

With that being said, however, there are certainly ways to show people both the forum and the blog when they land on the home page. First, you’ll need to decide which one is most important to your long-term goals. If you decide it’s the forum, then leave it where it currently resides (root directory) and find a way to display some of your blog content on the forum home page — or at least provide a prominent link to the blog.

If you want the forum to stay where it is as the main page of your site, you could display the most recent blog posts by using the blog’s RSS feed. There are a lot of free tools online to help with this, such as the RSS readers available at Google Gadgets.

Another alternative is to put both the blog and the forum into their own sub-folders (such as /blog/ and /forum/), and then create a custom home page that links to both of those sections.

The most important thing you need to do right now is decide on a strategy, and then stick with it. Your blog only has one blog entry on it, so it won’t be a big deal to reinstall WordPress to the root directory (if that’s what you decide to do). But when you have a lot of content, things get trickier. So start by figuring out the best strategy.

Good luck. ~Brandon

P.S. — Feel free to leave a comment below if you have more questions.