If you’ve decided to go for a static front page on your WordPress.com site, you’ll probably want a “Blog” page, where all your posts will be listed out. You’ll also probably want that page to be on your menu. Here’s how to do it…

1. Go to Pages > Add New and enter your page title as “Blog”, or whatever you’d like to call it. Leave the page content empty and hit the “Publish” button on the right hand side.
2. Go to Settings > Reading. The second drop-down box at the top allows you to select your “posts” page. This is the page that will list out your blog posts. Click the little down arrow and then click on “Blog”, or whatever you called your page. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes”.
3. If your new “Blog” page doesn’t appear in your menu, you’ll need to add it manually. This will probably be as simple as going to Appearance > Menus, checking your new “Blog” page on the left hand side and clicking “Add to Menu”. You can then re-order the menu items by dragging them, if needed. If you need more help with customizing your menu, here’s WordPress.com’s official guide.

All the best,
James

If you’re reading this, the chances are you have a WordPress.com website and so probably follow a few others. If so, check out this page…

http://wordpress.com/following/edit

You’ll see a list of all the websites you follow. By clicking the little EDIT link next to a blog, you can change the frequency of “new post” email notifications (instantly, daily or weekly), and even choose to receive an email when ANY comment is posted to that blog. This is a great feature if you’re fanatical about a site and what to know when anything is said :-)

All the best,
James

Katharine asks…

“Is it better to go with WordPress.com or a WordPress.org self-hosted website? What’s the difference between them?”

I wouldn’t recommend self-hosting unless you’re technically minded and have an active interest in the technical side of websites. And even then I wouldn’t really recommend it haha :-)

In my opinion, self-hosting is really only for people who have very specific requirements for their websites. There are only really two big reasons to go self-hosted…

Flexibility is perhaps the biggest. Having a self-hosted site means you can hack and edit your site to your heart’s content because you have complete access to all the source files. However, this requires quite specific technical knowledge, and these days WordPress themes and widgets offer such flexibility that it’s rare that you need to dive “under the hood” in this way.

Continue reading →

You sell a product through PayPal and need to update the email address customers see on their Thank You page and email receipt. But despite adding the new email address, making it primary and deleting the old address entirely, your customers are still seeing the old email address.

What’s going on?

Turns out, the email address being shown to your customers is your customer service email address. I do remember PayPal asking me to enter a customer service email address at some point… which I duly obliged. So how do we update that address?  Continue reading →