How to Create Static-Like Pages in Blogger

For many blog authors, Wordpress is the management system of choice. It provides the most flexibility and options for managing blogs. For those that are not using Wordpress, Blogger is a good, free option. Blogger, however, is not nearly as flexible to use as Wordpress. There are fewer options and templates for that system. The one drawback of using Blogger is the inability of uploading, and using static HTML pages.

There is a simple workaround that you can use to create pages in your Blogger blog that will mimic static pages. I will discuss how to create and use those pages in this post.

Creating Posts as Static Pages

The only option, at the time of this post, to creating static HTML pages in a Blogger blog is by using posts. Now you can easily create an HTML page on another server and then link to it from your blog, but it is much easier to use posts as they will include your template.

When creating the static pages, there are a few things that I would like to point out:

1. The static pages should not appear in your RSS feeds to your subscribers. They will not be used as posts, so they shouldn’t be included.
2. The date published shouldn’t be included.
3. Comments for the page aren’t needed.

I will now show you how to accomplish the above points easily within Blogger. We will be creating a post that will act like a static page on your Blogger blog.

1. Start a new post in Blogger.
2. Enter the information that you would like displayed on the page in the Blogger editor.
3. Once you have entered the content, click the Post Options link.
4. Now we will satisfy two of the points above. Below Reader Comments select the Don’t allow option to disable the comments for the page.
5. Below Post date and time, enter a date that occurs in the past. For my pages I use June 23, 2007 since that is the first day of Technically Easy. This should prevent the post from being sent to your subscribers as an update.
6. When everything is ready to be published, click the Publish Post button.

Now we have a new post that has a past date and doesn’t allow comments. The next steps will prevent the post date from being displayed.

1. Click the Layout tab to display your blog’s layout.
2. Click the Edit HTML link to display the layout in HTML.
3. Check the Expand Widget Templates checkbox to display the Blogger code for each widget.
4. Search for the location where the post date is displayed. For blogs that use version 2, search for <data:post.dateHeader/>.
5. Before that line include the following:
   <b:if cond=’data:post.allowComments’>
6. After the post date line include:
   </b:if>

This tells Blogger to only display the post date if comments are allowed for the post. Since we disabled comments, the post date won’t be displayed.

Now load up the new page to see if it is displayed as you would like. You can now link to that page from anywhere on your blog, or another Web site.

Summary

Blogger doesn’t have the ability to add static HTML pages to your blog. To mimic static HTML pages, you can simply create a past-dated post and link to it as if it were a static HTML page. This post also showed how you can prevent the post date from being displayed to make it look even more like a static page instead of a post.

Related Posts

Creating Static Pages in Blogger - Part 2
Grouping Posts By Categories in Blogger
Blog Designing Tips for New Bloggers
What to Avoid When Designing Web Sites