How to make an actual page, not a blog

With just about any theme, you can have a static page as your home page instead of a blog page. You just go to Settings > Reading from the Admin dashboard. In the section labeled Front page displays, you mark A static page and pick which page that you’ve created from a drop-down list.

Now, if you are looking for a specific theme that closely matches the look of the image on the site, you won’t find anything exact, of course. Some themes are a bit more customizable than others, but if you have some HTML & CSS knowledge, you can turn just about any theme into what you need.

I did this as a static page, of course, but I want to locate a picture at the top, with a few hyperlink text fields in blocks at the right, then another picture in the middle, and then two pictures and a second menu in the bottom third of the page.

I previewed 1,027 single-column templates and short-listed about 40 of them, and have tried my page with about 7 so far. None seem to offer the flexibility to put images on the top, middle, AND bottoms.

What I am wondering is whether WordPress is really the proper platform for genuine static pages, or if its historical orientation as a blog / magazine ECM environment actually precludes free-form static pages of the type I want to create [I need to make 16 of them].

I could do them in native HTML5/CSS3, but that clearly takes a long time. I suppose I could customize templates in WordPress in PHP, but I don’t know PHP yet, and would need to learn the WordPress theme format. [I wrote code for about 20 years, including c, FORTRAN, Pascal, and assembly language, so it’s not my first trip to the rodeo on that front.]

Suggestions? I need to get this out quickly, and do not want to waste a lot of time with WordPress if it’s the wrong path.

Incidentally, it’s MARVELOUS for its intended purpose. I just want to be sure I’m not wasting a lot of time with a crescent wrench, when what I needed was a pair of pliers. ??

WordPress can do pretty much anything you want – if you have the necessary PHP, HTML & CSS skills.

I am having a similar problem – Created a Page and it showing as a Post. There is NO Page Attribute drop down option and the Page Attribute IS checked.

I’ve had this happen on another site and NEVER did figure it out and basically gave up. This particular website, I will be adding multiple page so it’s a really big concern.

Can anyone help me please??

If you require assistance then, as per the Forum Welcome, please post your own topic instead of tagging onto someone else’s topic. Your question is completely different.

@wayne, if you are comfortable coding HTML & CSS, I would recommend the Montezuma theme. Highly customizable, because instead of a limited set of options that most themes use, with Montezuma you work with virtual template and virtual CSS files. The virtual templates give you a lot of freedom to determine the layout of a site. Put an image anywhere. Put a widget area anywhere, in a header, footer, or sidebar. You can also create custom templates so that if your site normally has a sidebar, but you have one or more pages with a lot of content such that you want to eliminate the sidebar, you can do it with a virtual custom template. I will say that there is a bit of a learning curve if you’re not familiar with the way WordPress works (i.e., when index.php, single.php, or page.php are used), or don’t have a basic knowledge of HTML & CSS.

Here are a sampling of sites which use the theme, showing a wide range of styles and layouts (the last two are sites that I developed). More sample sites on the BytesForAll Showing Off thread.
Silver Lake Art Garage
Raise A Child
Cartidea
Mondo Moda Bimbo
Rishona Campbell
Beard Food
Venice Hongwanji Buddhist Temple
El Segundo High School Girls Basketball Team