How can I use WordPress to host a website without blogs or commenting?

Question:

How do I use this site as a website without blogging, comments, etc.?

Answer:

You mean the WordPress.com site? You still need to use the WordPress blogging platform. You can’t build an HTML site, but you can make WordPress look like a website.

1. Pick a theme like Twenty Eleven that has some theme options that you can edit.
2. Go into Appearance: Theme Options.
3. Change the Default Layout to One Column, No Sidebar. That will give you a plain “webpage-type” look.
4. Then you’ll need to turn off comments. Go to Settings: Discussion: and uncheck “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. That will hide the comments fields.
5. Then you’ll need to create a page, not a post for your home page.
6. Then go into Settings: Reading and select “A static page (select below)”, then pick that home page you just created from the drop-down list for the Front Page.
7. Then go down a bit and change “Blog pages show at most” 1 post.
8. For Navigation, create your own custom menus in Appearance: Menus. I always create my own top navigation bar called Top Nav and assign it to my theme, but I see Twenty Eleven doesn’t have that option. However, you can get around that by creating pages instead of posts. Those pages will appear in the navigation and you can set up child pages under parent pages and that will create a multi-level menu. Make your parent page title short and make them sensible keywords.

Of course, you could just get yourself some REAL web hosting and then you can do whatever you want. I use Artisteer to make my own themes so I can get that “website” look. Artisteer is a theme and template design tool. VERY easy to use. You can do WordPress, Joomla, Blogger, Drupal and more. The new 3.1 version for Windows (they also have a Mac version) now builds regular HTML websites! You can download it for free and try it out.

I suggest using either iPage or WebHostingHub for web hosting. The WordPress software is already available in the control panel in the script installer, so you don’t have to upload anything. The installer is called SimpleScripts at iPage and at the Hub, they use Fantastico.