Very general questions about formatting, home page

[jskintauy]

Hi All,

I am very new to a framework and have limited experience with WordPress. I do have decent HTML/CSS and PHP skills. Unfortunately, I am pretty confused about how to layout my page. I am using the Modern Portfolio theme (using local development environment) and really am having trouble with a couple of issues. The first is very general. I can add menus and change the header easily, but when I attempt to start putting in other content the trouble starts.
Here is an example. I would like to put some intro text below the header and menu. I guessed from some of the introductory documentation that it would go in one of the widget areas under Header Right or Primary Sidebar.
Here is a list of the widget areas:
Header Right
Primary Sidebar
About
Portfolio
Services
Blog
Footer 1
Footer 2
Footer 3

I don't want blog posts to appear and according to the Studio TV tutorial "How to Create a Custom Homepage with the Genesis Framework..." you do this by adding a text widget in one of the widget areas below the header. So I started doing this. Note that this is a two column layout and I don't want the intro text to actually appear in the sidebar. I did refresh the browser after each change to make sure it updated. So here is what happens:
1. Put text widget in Primary Sidebar. Works fine, except I don't want the intro text in the sidebar.
2. Put text widget in About (seems like a logical place for intro text!) and it appears in a black background below the header and the navigation menu disappears. Not good.
3. Put text widget in Portfolio. Now the black background disappears, along with the navigation menu and the sidebar. Double not good.
4. Put text widget in Services. The black background is back, no menu, and no sidebar
5. Put text in Blog (this almost can't be right...) but it took away the black background, no menu, no sidebar

I didn't bother trying in the footer areas. Now I am assuming, to get this to work I will need to add additional widget areas, but I am not sure. If that is the case, can someone confirm that?

Further, I have a question about additional pages and a mistake I may have made. My settings are for the homepage to contain posts. I added a few pages and called one of them Home with the default template. When I open the site it goes to the "/" url, not Home. When I change the URL to /home, I get different results, but nothing like what I want. The only good thing is the navigation menu stays.

What am I doing wrong and how do I start to unwind this?

Thanks alot, in advance....

Jim S

[Brad Dalton]

The theme includes a home page with widgets so you don't need to change any reading settings or add a home page.

Use the default reading settings to display your latest posts and completely delete the home page you have created from the trash folder.

Then add a text widget below your nav menu.

http://www.briangardner.com/welcome-text-widget/

You may need to tweak the CSS for your home page.

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Tutorials for StudioPress Themes.

[AnitaC]

First, you should use the Get Started instructions for the theme - http://my.studiopress.com/setup/modern-portfolio-theme/. When you purchase a theme - it designed to do just what you see in the demo. If you want to add content to any other areas not included in the demo - you need to register a new widget area and use the appropriate conditional code for that area. This is the Hook Guide for PRE-Genesis 2.0 - http://genesistutorials.com/visual-hook-guide/. Once they launch 2.0, things might work a bit differently.

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Need help with customization or troubleshooting? Reach out to me.

[jskintauy]

Hi Brad and Anitac,

Thanks for the responses, both are very helpful.

Brad, I did as you suggested and trashed the home page. I never changed the default setting under Reading, so no issues there. There are still a couple of issues that I was hoping to get help with. When I do this, it appears that no matter what I do with the menu it will only display in the header (correctly) or in one of the other widget areas as an unordered list or not at all. I really don't want the menu in the header Any idea of why it exhibits this behavior? Note that I could use CSS to put it where I want if header is the only option.
The other question concerns navigation. If I don't have a "home" page (I should say, a page called Home 🙂 of course there is no home navigation. You then have to select the title or the "M" in the corner. Is there a way around this with some type of redirect? Thanks ahead for those.

Anitac, Your answer clears up a lot of misconceptions about the process for doing this. I did look at the documentation and will look at it again from a different perspective. It will be no issue to add new widget areas. Thanks for the link to the Hook Guide.

Thanks again,

Jim

[Brad Dalton]

You can add it in any hook position anywhere on your site using a custom function.

Otherwise, you'll need to use the custom menu widget in the header right widget area. It should display horizontally otherwise check your I.E browser settings. Tools > Compatibility View Settings unchecked.

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Tutorials for StudioPress Themes.

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