With all of my attention on Home-Starts over the past few months, I have been looking carefully at some of the slightly older sites and thinking about how they could be improved. I have also had some specific requests that have come in and based on both those and some of my other ponderings I have come up with the following idea. Depending if and when you were in the Home-Start upgrade cycle you may have this. If you have not, you can request it and I will add it in for you. 

The Problem

When you add news to a website it is generally shown on the news page. Which means someone has to find the news page to see it.

Some websites have the home page featuring news, but then the page can become very messy and confusing for someone landing there.

For this reason I started putting the last three news items on the home page, so anyone landing on a site and viewing the home page could see the latest news. With Divi this is very easy to do, it can also be done on a non divi website, but is more complicated to achieve the same result. 

Then a request came in to control what is on the home page. Up to this point I had displayed the last three posts based on when they were added automatically. 

The Solution

For the blog section on the home page, make it a filtered blog and only show things in a special category. In my case I simply created a category called Front Page and checked the box. All posts with this box checked will appear on the front page of the website. Well the last three based on the published date. So if you publish a fourth item one will disappear. 

This means your key or high profile news items can now be controlled. So you publish it once, and it can appear on the generic news page, and also on the home page. All of this is automatic. 

Extending this further……

When you consider the behaviour of a visitor to the site, they may be looking at say volunteering. Why not add a filtered blog at the bottom of the Volunteering page which only shows news in the category Volunteering. That way your news is still relevant to the topic being viewed. Therefore increasing the chance of it being read. 

Largely driven by the complexity and volume of posts (news items) on some sites I have created micro blogs for Recruitment, Volunteering, Fundraising, Events, and the Front Page as well as the general news page.

Retro Addition

All of this is fairly easy to add to an existing Divi website. If you are interested and would like this let me know.