Many wordpress pundits tell you that to draw visitors, you need a compelling front page, also known as a landing page or home page. I was using the default wordpress home page of the most recent posts.
It turned out that to create an attractive static front page, I had to transition from the WordPress Twenty Sixteen theme to Twenty Seventeen. This gives me full-width page templates for the front page, so that I do not get the top or side menus. It was also necessary to go full-width in order to use a page builder like Elementor.
Elementor is an exceptionally powerful free WordPress plugin. It has templates to create some very elegant webpages, which I obviously eschewed in favor of being more densely packed and informative, with few images. I apologize for the choice of colors, but the color picker in Elementor is not as controllable as Adobe. After a certain amount of frustration, I gave up and settled.
I also came across a bug in the use of tabs, and I wish Elementor used relative links within wordpress. I also discovered that the Elementor full-width static front page does not render the Google Analytics and Adsense tracking codes in header.php. I instead had to insert those tracking codes into the header of the new front page.
But other than that, I found the Elementor Page Builder plugin helped me create something different and surely more eye-catching. I’m going to track my google analytics to see how these changes affect my website traffic.
As always, if you have a question, use the Contact Me page.
Update May-9-2020:
A few months ago, I decided that the Elementor homepage was too slow. The WordPress Guttenberg editor allows me to duplicate most of the function of the Elementor page. It’s not as glitzy, but it gets the job done and seems to be faster.
