Blogger Magic - Make A Static Main Page

Some blog owners want to publish posts, and display a static main page - and want to view blog content, in one or more tabbed pages.

It's not difficult to create the tabbed pages. The difficulty would come, long ago, when setting up the main page. We had several workarounds for making a static main page - none of them equally easy to use, effective, and elegant.

Then, Blogger created Custom Redirects - and gave us static main pages, that are easy to use, effective, and elegant.

Like a selected posts main page, it's not difficult to publish a blog with a static main page.

1. Create and publish a static page, with appropriate content.
2. Setup a custom redirect, for the Home page to the static page.
3. Link to the blog posts.
4. Add content.

Create and publish a static page.

Use the Page Editor, and create a static page, containing what you like. Use "Configure Page List", if you like, and change the "Home" caption.

If you want a useful page title, and browser tab label, you need to enter the page title into the title window, when the page is originally published, using Roman alphabet letters. If you enter the title using characters in a non Roman font, such as Chinese, Russian, or Thai characters, the page will have a URL created as "... /p/blog-page.html" (or "... /p/blog-page_30.html", for a page published on the 30th day of the month).

Also, the page editor does not have the Permalink option - that is only provided in the post editor. The page URL will lead to the page title, when the page is initially published.

Redirect the main page to the new static page.

Add a custom redirect, that targets the static page just added.

From: /
To: /p/Home.html

Link to the blog posts.

Make the static home page part of the blog - and make the rest of the blog accessible.

Add content, to the blog.

Having setup your pages, dynamic and static, publish posts, to "Blog" and to any other labels. That's why you build (dynamic) pages, using label searches.