Your homepage is the hub of your site and the first page people see when they visit your site.
It is exactly the same as any other blog on your site. This means you can write posts, add pages, change themes, add widgets etc that provide information and tips to help your users.
The key to designing a good homepage is to think how you can use it to support your blog users while making your WordPress MU site more effective to manage.
Here are my top 3 tips for designing your homepage:
#1 Choose A Good theme
Popular themes for homepages on Campus sites are WPMU-Nelo, WPMU-Dixi and WPMU-Triden because they are the most customisable themes:
- WPMU-Dixi includes optional RSS feed for up to 4 feeds on the front page.
- WPMU-nelo: see this theme in use on Sample Academic blog
- WPMU-triden includes the option of a custom image gallery – see this theme in use on Sample Student portfolio
These themes are included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.
Any of these themes will make your homepage look considerably more attractive than the default theme.
Read how National University of Singapore customised their homepage using WPMU-Nelo!
For more information on working with themes see:
- What to consider when choosing your blog’s theme
- Changing themes site wide
- Changing themes on a per blog basis
- Changing your blog’s theme
- Uploading your Custom Image Header
#2 Include A Link for Users to Create their own blogs or usernames
Creating blogs and usernames is time consuming. Where possible it’s always best to get your community to create their own.
This is achieved by:
- Selecting ‘ Enabled. Blogs and user accounts can be created’ under Allow new registrations in Site Admin > Options so that anyone can create blogs using your signup page
- Restricting who can sign ups to specific email domains to limit who registers on your site by adding domains to the ‘limit email registrations’ section in Site Admin > Options
- Creating a link to your sign up page with HTML code using a text widget in your homepage sidebar.
The URL of your signup page is your site location with wp-signup.php on the end. For example, this is the location http://blog.nus.edu.sg/wp-signup.php of National University of Singapore signup page
It is possible to make your homepage public so users can create their own account while making the rest of the blogs private. This is done using the Privacy option in Site Admin > Options.
The privacy option is included in all Edublogs Campus sites and can be downloaded from WPMU DEV Premium.
# 3 Add a FAQ and how to get support page
Make it as easy as possible for your users to find the information they need to solve their own problems while also providing them instructions on what to do if they need assistance.
For examples on how you can achieve this check out:
- National University of Singapore’s FAQ page
- Global Student’s Help & Support page
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