Keep It Simple: The Front Page
April 07, 2011
All bloggers want to make sure that their blogs make the best possible impact on the most readers in the shortest space of time. The best way to do that is to make sure to display the most important information in a prominent position so that your readers can quickly discover what the blog is about, why they should stay on and read, and why they should come back for more.
The Front Page is the first thing visitors to your blog will see, so having interesting, dynamic content there is one of the most important things that you can do to turn new readers into return readers. Luckily, TypePad offers several tools to customize how your content is displayed on the front page, and we've included some of the best features below.
Feature a Post
By featuring a post on your blog, you can highlight a post at the top of the main content column. This is great if you want to present a short introduction to your blog or highlight a post for a time. The featured post will stick to the top of the column with all new posts listed below it.
To feature a post, check the Feature This Post box before you hit Publish.
See the featured post article for more information.
Use a Page as the Front Page
You may want to display a Page as the Front Page, instead of the blog index. At Settings > Posts, you can select to Display a "page" as the front page and choose a published page from the drop-down menu.
See the posts settings article for more information.
Display Post Excerpts
For longer posts, you may want to only display an excerpt of your post on the Front Page followed by a link to the full post. When composing your posts, click the Split Extended Entry button in the Rich Text toolbar to add the extended entry break to your post. You can use your mouse to move the break to the preferred location. Content above the break will display on your index pages followed by a link to Continue reading the post.
See the split extended entry article for more information.
Display Posts by Category
Maybe you only want to display some posts on the Front Page of your blog and automatically archive other posts. By using the Limit Posts feature at Settings > Posts, you can select to display posts only assigned to a specific category.
See the posts settings article for more information.
