This article is about the options for setting the home page for blogs made with Google's Blogger.
But there may be blogs/websites where you want a welcome message or a particular post to appear first whenever someone visits your blog, or where you want to put all your posts in reverse order.
This article is about options for giving your Blogger blog a "home page".
Summary:
Options for giving your blog a home page include:
- Static page combined with a custom re-direct - as discovered by Mian Shahzeb.
June 2012 update: this is now my recommended method of home-page implementation, and I am progressively applying it to those blogs that need a "home page".
- Displaying all the posts in reverse order
- Choosing one post to be a welcome message, and always giving it the latest post-date
- Displaying a gadget at the top of your posts area, and only showing it on the home page.
Advantages and Disadvantages of each option:
| Option | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| Static page and custom re-direct | No template editing is needed Easy page editing - no messing around putting content into a gadget No gaps on other pages due to the gadget being "missing" Simple, elegant, and fully functional. | Google probably didn't intend to give us this option when they set up custom re-directs, so it's possible that they might remove it again. (It's such a nice solution, though, that I think it's worth the risk for now) |
| Show all posts in reverse order | Great for new readers - they can "follow the story". | Return visitors have to navigate down to where they were up to last time: the blog has no way of helping them to remember where that was. You can't use most of Blogger's date features: newer and older posts links will take the reader in the "wrong" direction. And you have to manually enter any dates that would be relevant. Your posts will get "older" as you write more: this may confuse search-engines, and there's a risk that google might to things to "very old" posts in the future. |
| Make one post always show up first | You can still use all of Google's date features. Readers will know when you actually posted to your blog. Great for returning readers: they can see your (current) welcome comments, and then go straight to the latest post after that. | You have to remember to edit the "chosen" post every single time that you make a new post - one day, you might forget. This approach probably won't work on multi-author blogs: there's a very high chance that someone would forget to edit the chosen post and change its date. |
| Show a "welcome gadget" on the home page only | Doesn't need any changes to Post date-time settings. Your blog still functions like a blog (older/newer post links , archive gadget etc). An HTML/Javascript gadget can be very flexible, and you can get Blogger to write all the HTML for you - seeMaking a Gadget Like a Post. You can use things other than text, eg a picture or even a poll. It includes an extreme option: you could show no posts on the "home" page, and just show the gadget. | You need to edit your HTML template to make this work. You need to re-do the template customisation every time that you change templates. The welcome gadget isn't one of your posts: it's not included in exports of your blog contents (It is in an export of your template - but I don't think that the words inside it are included). A gadget cannot show quite as many things as a post. |
A non-option: Setting the homepage's post date into the future
Some people suggest that you can set the post-date of your main page in the future - and at some times in Blogger's past this has worked.
But now that scheduled posting is working the way most people expect it to (ie if you write a post today, and publish it with tomorrow's date, then it is shown to your readers from tomorrow onwards), this will not work - because your "home page" won't show until that future date is reached.
There may be some ways you can fudge it in to working (eg post the page with a date in the past, and then post it again with a future date). But I VERY STRONGLY don't recommend this: even if they work today, they may stop working at some time in the future when Google make a change to how future-dated posts are handled.
