Some informations about the use of statics pages in WordPress

Question

I am pretty new in WordPress world (I came from Joomla) and I have some questions about the use of static pages in WordPress.

I have to use WordPress to implement a mainly static site (maybe in the future I will add some dynamic behavior but at this time I only need some statics pages)

So I have install a WordPress example intallation on my server: http://onofri.org/example/ and I have create a first static page, this one: http://onofri.org/example/?page_id=4

Now I have 3 doubts on how to proceed my work:

1. How can I say to WordPress to use the previous static page as an HomePage? I would that when the user open my website this page is show as a lassic static homepage, can I do this thing? how?

2. As you can see in the top of the page (upon the header) there is a menù with the names of my statics page (sample page and my HomePage pages), how can I don't show this menù? Have I to delete it from the code of my template or can I disable it from the WordPress administration pannel?

3. Can I have a classic menù containing the list of my statics pages in the left column (something like in this site: http://www.saranistri.com/ where in the left column I have a menù with the links to my pages)

Thanks

Andrea

Answer 1

It's pretty easy to set whatever page you want as your homepage. The WP Codex has pretty detailed instructions on how you can do it.

But basically you create two pages, one for your homepage and another page for your blog (or news or whatever else you want to call the dynamically generated content--or none at all). You can then set your custom page as the homepage in the admin. Also in order to have clean urls you'll have to set your permalink structure.

The menu editor in WordPress allows you to create a custom menu and then to show it on a location in your site, depending on the template. It's not that different from Joomla's functionality there.

As far as menu display goes, you'll have to either find a theme that has the main navigation menu on the left side, edit the theme template or probably simply just use a widget to display the custom menu.