If you are now familiar with your website then you will know that when you type in http://www.mysite.co.uk it goes straight to the home page. If you were marketing something then you could have a news item that is prominent, but then you rely on someone locating it. If you have a newsletter built into your site then you are pushing the information out to an already interested audience. But is there a better way?

Yes there is!

Let’s assume that I am preparing for a fundraising event. If I create a page for the fundraising event, add images on there, put the value proposition on there to convince people to part with their hard earned cash and maybe a link to more detail within the website. It needs to be big bold and beautiful aka eye catching. Let’s say I save this page with the page name “Fundraiser”

At this point I have a virtual poster in the Fundraiser page but it is not linked to anything.

Making Fundraiser the landing page

If you now go to the Dashboard and choose Appearance, then Customise you will see an entry which says Static Front Page. Click on this. You will see something similar to the image on the left. This tells us that the landing page for anyone is the Home Page (or equivalent), and where to find the news or Posts page.

We are interested in making sure every visitor is aware that there is a fundraising event coming up. So we change the entry which says Home to Fundraiser.

We then save the settings. Now view the site (equivalent of landing on the home page). You will find you land on the Fundraiser page now. To get to the rest of the site you use the menu. Once on the site, they cannot get back to the fundraising “home page” however they did see it on the way into the site.

Don’t forget to change it back, and don’t over use it otherwise it is not a surprise anymore.

For a limited time only you can see this demonstrated on this website:

http://www.home-starthampshire.org.uk

It may not be present after the middle of March 2015.