Taking Your WordPress Website To The Next Level

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The great thing about WordPress is that it is so easy to use. If you have read our previous article, Start Your Work-From-Home Website With WordPress, you'll already know how to install WordPress, find a great theme and create a range of pages and posts.

But the simplicity of WordPress hides an advanced system that, with a little bit of extra knowledge, can be made to do incredible things. Just looking at a few of the websites that are powered by WordPress as a content management system (CMS) says it all - WordPress makes building a site easier, but never limits what you can do.

Read on to find out about some of the advanced features of WordPress and how you can use these tools to take your work-from-home website to the next level.

Build A Work-From-Home Website With A Blog

Since WordPress was initially launched as a blogging tool, even the latest versions assume that your blog is the heart of your website. Although a blog is important, most professional business websites take a different approach, with pages as main content and blog posts as an additional feature.

If you want a static page to appear as your homepage, you can change a single setting within your WordPress control panel. First, make sure that you have created the page that you plan to use as your homepage, and a different page where your blog posts will be located. You can leave your blog page blank, as akismet alternatives  will automatically pull in every post that you add.

Then, from the Settings menu, select Reading. The first setting defines what your front page, or homepage, will display. Simply select the static page that you want visitors to see when they land on your website, and select your preferred posts page for blog updates or news items.

This relatively insignificant change can make a world of difference to how professional your website seems. Even better, you can still integrate your regularly updated posts into your homepage using widgets - WordPress includes a Recent Posts widget as standard.

WordPress Plugins - Making Your Website Do More

Although WordPress comes complete with the most commonly used tools and widgets that you will need, you can easily add new features using plugins. Plugins are installed through the WordPress interface, using the Plugins menu in your control panel.

There are plugins available for just about any task, most of which are available free. At the time of writing, the WordPress Plugins database features 21,500 plugins, all of which are searchable by category, rating and name.