Redirecting the Blogger Home Page to a Static Page

The great thing about the new Blogger template is that you can redirect pages to other pages now in the 'Settings' menu. Oddly, it is buried deep within the Blogger settings under 'Search Preferences':

Go ahead and choose the 'Edit' text link just to the right of the 'Custom Redirect' item. Now, this is a very critical step - be sure to enter the following text into the From: and To: boxes in the Redirect dialog:

In the From: box enter only a forward slash - "/". In the To: box enter the exact page name - in our case it was "/p/home-page.html". All Blogger static pages have a /p in front of the URL. You can see that the html name was the page title we used, so if you used something else for your title like 'Main Page' then the html would be /p/main-page.html.

Go ahead and press the little 'Save' text link and then the 'Save changes' button highlighted in the image above. What's now going to happen is that your main URL will redirect to the static page you've created. Go ahead and try to access your blog now - you should go directly to the new static page from the main URL.

Enabling Tabs for a Static Blogger Homepage

The very last step is to hide the original Home page link and add a page link to your blog pages so that the visible tabs work correctly. First, enable tabs from the Pages menu:

Be sure to press 'Save arrangement' in the upper right of the screen (not seen here)!  When you go to your home page you should now see the tab bar across the top of your blog. However, now when you click on either Home or Home Page you're going directly to your new static page. What you have to do at this point is hide the original 'Home' Page using the Layout editor. Open the Layout using the editor from the Blogger main menu:

Choose the 'Edit' text link in the Pages item within the layout. This is going to allow you to hide particular pages. Once you open the Pages layout editor you'll notice that you can hide certain pages:

Be sure to un-select the check box right next to the 'Home' page to make sure it stays hidden. Press 'Save' to hide that particular tab.

The final step is to add another Page that links to the blog posts directly. This isn't something you have to do - your blog posts can still show on the right sidebar in the layout. However, if you do want to get back to the main blogging page that has the last posts together, you'll need to add a link back to them. Once we changed the Home page link to the static page there's no longer any links to the main Posts page.