Creating a home page

I like Blogger as a platform. It's easy and quick and doesn't bug me about the crap that Wordpress does, although I have used Wordpress in the past, and I like it enough.  There were a couple of things I wanted to do with my blogger account.  I wanted to have a static front page and I wanted to add a custom URL.  Apparently this is not always easy.

Setting the Static Front Page

Well, here's a shout out to the guy that helped me with that issue:  http://www.southernspeakers.net

Now I will say the article is a little out of date, as Blogger has changed since this was written but with some searching in the Blogger settings and this article I was able to create a static front page.

Assigning the URL

This is pretty simple to do.  

Settings

You can see what the original Google account URL was, and you simply add the new custom domain, and then enable the redirect. There are some changes to the domain provider that needs to be implemented. In my case, I use Dotster.com for my URL management and they have instructions on how to change the DNS records to redirect to your blogger account.

Sometimes you may have to wait a few minutes for the DNS changes to propagate. This can be frustrating but patience is the key here.  You will notice that I have not included many screen shots and detailed instructions.  This is deliberate as the interface changes as the systems involved get updated.  The best you can do is get the general feel for where to go and what to do and try things.  This is what I had to do even given the documentation available to me.