Thread: Wordpress Navigation Problem - Static Page as Home Page

I have an issue with wordpress where I've created a wordpress site with a static home page. The static page needs to be called “Home” or some other name. The problem is that when I make a static home page, I have two duplicate pages - the "static front page" and the "Home" page.

You really shouldn't need to do anything. Google will usually resolve the duplicate page issue.

But I decided to monkey around with it. I changed the 'static front page' to a 'sticky post' and removed the links to the page called "Home' from the navigation and from the page title in the header of the post.

The page has now dropped like a brick. Any thoughts?

See how easy it is?
So many people are afraid to make changes to a wordpress theme or the base wordpress script.

I do that on a lot of my blogs, get the navigation to home/about/any other pages from the top to the sidebar.
And eliminate the about page.

Really, the only reason Home page is there is for people to be able to get back to the front page from any interior pages they are at.
I have seen lots of blogs with no Home page, or where the title is linkable to the home page.

And a lot of people really do not know about Pages in wordpress.
Excellent way to put information you want people to find no matter where they are at on your blog.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

See how easy it is?
So many people are afraid to make changes to a wordpress theme or the base wordpress script.

Wordpress really isn't designed as a content management system. It takes a lot of time to modify the templates, because, you need to look in a lot of different files. Wordpress is basically php code connected to a sql database.

For a mini site of 5-20 pages, I recommend using a 'php include' template. Even without any knowledge of php, the php include templates are easy to modify. Here's a couple of free php include templates available for download:

Free PHP Web Design Template Download

FREEWebPlate: A FREE PHP / CSS / XHTML Website Template... Enjoy | Fully Customize | Fully Make It Yours

Originally Posted by iowadawg

And a lot of people really do not know about Pages in wordpress. Excellent way to put information you want people to find no matter where they are at on your blog.

Instead of using pages, I'm using posts. The 'homepage' is a sticky post and the index is set to display 1 post.

I'm using the following code to display the posts in a menu in the sidebar. $post->ID == '10' is the post ID of the sticky post which excludes the post. So that you don't have duplicate content.

Code:

<ul><h2>Menu</h2>
  <li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"></a></li>
  <?php query_posts('showposts=20'); ?>
  <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); if( $post->ID == '10' ) continue; ?>
  <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
  <?php endwhile;?>
</ul>

@bogart, I had that problem one time when I used a WordPress 'page' and designated it as the home page. I ended up with two URLs for the home page. I excluded the file name frome the menu, but Google still found it because there are still two valid URLs for the same page. Googlebot may have found it before I excluded the page in the menu or it could have picked it up through the Toolbar.

The better way to deal with this is a make a copy of the index.php home page file in your theme and rename it as home.php or simply use index.php. Re-work this as your static home page and you will not end up with two URLs as the home page. home.php is part of the WordPress override system. WordPress looks for that file name BEFORE it looks for index.php in your theme. You end up with only one possible URL representing the home page. The only downside is that you have to manually edit it when you want to make changes.

@TopDogger Seems to be an issue with the theme. But yeah, excluding the page still leaves the orphan post for Google to find and crawl. I installed WordPress › Redirection � WordPress Plugins wordpress plugin and 301 redirected the post to the index page.

I wish I had left the site alone. It was ranking the third page on the EMD with only one article and no link building. Now the site is page #25

I had to do an .htaccess 301 redirect to fix the problem when I ran into it.

You should check that redirection plugin with WP 3.0.3. 6 out of 8 people report that it does not work with 3.0.3.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I had to do an .htaccess 301 redirect to fix the problem when I ran into it.

You should check that redirection plugin with WP 3.0.3. 6 out of 8 people report that it does not work with 3.0.3.

The redirect is working. But I have wordpress 3.0.1 installed.

The redirect seems to have done the trick. The site has moved up three pages since yesterday.