I used to hate Wordpress because every Wordpress-driven website I saw looked, well, like a blog.  You know, dated entries and a bunch of stuff to the side that almost always talked about “categories,” “archives,” and (ick) a “blogroll.”

But then I realized that it just didn’t have to be that way.  So I started trying to figure out how people were doing it.

Here’s a step by step thing I wrote for you to guide you through it…

Here’s how to make a new homepage on a Wordpress 2.7+ site that doesn’t look like a blog:

First, you’ll need a theme that uses a main navigation bar.  I used the Emporium theme from http://www.freewpthemes.net.  Upload it into the wp-content/themes directory on your website, and then select the theme in the Manage Themes area of your admin area (under Appearance).

Second, go ahead and make any changes to the theme you want.  You can use the Editor (also under Appearance in the admin area).  I didn’t like the way it made my site title and headlines (H1, H2, and H3’s) all lower case, so I removed the appropriate “text-transform: lowercase” line in the stylesheet.  I also made the main menu font bigger and changed the font and line spacing of the body text.

Third, publish a page called “Writing” or “Blog” or anything else that you want.  The title will be what goes in the main menu.  Don’t write anything on the page – just publishing it empty is enough.  You’ll also need to publish a page with your homepage text.  The title of this page will not be displayed in the menu, but will appear on your home page.

After creating those pages, go to the Settings -> Reading area of your WP admin panel.  The “Front page displays” options will help you transform the site.  Click the “A static page” radio button, and then select your home page you created for the Front page, and the empty writing/blog/whatever page for the “Posts page.”

But a small problem has developed — look at your blog: You’ll see that the home page is actually listed twice in your navigation menu.  Once as the Homepage and once as the title of the page (mine is “Welcome to MattGordon.com”).  Oops!

In order to fix this, let’s go back to the editor (under Appearance) and select the header.php file to edit.  Scroll all the way down, and the div called “menu” will be displayed.  This, not surprisingly, is the code that makes the main menu.

Incidentally, if you want to change the “Homepage” menu item to something else, look for the “class=”current_page_item”>Homepage</a>” code.  Just change “Homepage” to “Home” or whatever you want it to be.  You may notice that it isn’t in all caps like it appears on the site.  That’s because the stylesheet uses that “text-transform: uppercase” to change it.

To fix the double listing issue, replace this code “wp_list_pages(‘title_li=’ )” with this code: “wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&exclude=2′ )”  What you’re doing is adding an argument to the “wp_list_pages” template tag to exclude a certain page when it’s making the menu.  You will probably have to replace the number “2” with another number.  It will be the Wordpress ID number of your home page.  To find it, go to Pages -> Edit in your admin area and hover your cursor over the title of your home page.  Now look at the status bar in the bottom of your browser window.  The number at the end of that URL is the ID number you need to use in the above code.

That’s it, you should now be good to go!

In the book, “All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World,” author Seth Godin makes the point that all companies, brands, and products involve telling a story. Not only the stories the marketers are telling to get us to buy said products, but the stories we tell ourselves and those around us. Stories of what this product says about us, stories of the benefits of this product, stories of why this product was a better choice than others like it. You get the idea.

Stories are great, but here’s something to consider: what is YOUR story?  Not your company’s story, or the story of that you own, but specifically your story. If someone were to try and figure out your story, how would they do it?

1.)  Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page? What is on it? Is your online identity consistent with your “professional image?” Do you care?

2.) Are you on Twitter?  Now there’s a real story!  How would the narrative of your life read to an outsider?

3.)  Go ahead, Google yourself!  You know you want to.  Heck, you probably already have.  Are you represented?  Represented well?  What about on Google Images?  Does your past come back to haunt you?  How about someone with the same name as yours?  There’s one page where Matt Gordon professes to be a “Dyslexic Agnostic Insomniac.”  Definitely not me!

So there are three easy steps you can do right now to make sure your online branding is working for you, and not against you.  But now that you’ve identified the story that you’re putting out there (inadvertently or not), what’s the next step?

Changing the story.  Unfortunately, the nature of many websites is that once you’ve put it out there, it’s hard to reel it back in.  But there are things you can do — at varying degrees of ease — to at least bury the parts of the story that are inconsistent with your professional image.  Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1.) Do you have your own website?  It can be a sort of clearinghouse for people to find the relevant online aspects of your life.  Check out the home page for a guy named “Matt Gordon” for an example.

2.) Try a linking campaign to generate links to the more appropriate corners of the Internet with your name on them.  You can comment on highly ranked blogs, forums, etc., and include links in your signature.  Just make sure that the comments are intelligent and add something worthwhile to the conversation.  An excellent place to do this is websites focused on your market.

3.) For ultimate branding, try making your own blog.  There’s nothing that can get a message out better over the long-run than a well-optimized blog.

Hopefully, you will be inspired to investigate your own story and see what you can do about brushing it up!  Do you have any other ideas on how to clean up your online image?  Or maybe a story or two about the wisdom of doing so?  Leave me a comment below!