WordPress is mainly used as a blogging platform but because of its popularity, flexibility and ease of use it is increasingly being used to build websites.

If you’re new to websites then you may be unsure as to the difference between a blog and website. In which case I would recommend you take look at understanding the difference between a website and a blog.

Turning WordPress into a Website

To convert WordPress from a traditional blogging platform to a standard website all you need to do is to change the structure of the home page.
When WordPress is functioning as a blog the home page will contain a list of posts ordered by date (latest at the top). As new posts are added the content of the home page is changed to include the new posts.
All you need to do is to make the content of the home page static and instantly the home page now looks like an home page on a traditional website.

Since version 2.1 this has been very easy to do. Just go to Administration > Options > Reading panel and set it as shown below. (note: need to create the pages first.

Of course there are other thing you will need to do like:

• Decide on navigation structure
• Make the site search engine friendly

These I will be covering in a series of posts on how to setup WordPress as a website. However before you can set it up as a website you need to get WordPress installed on a host and for that you need host.
The one I use for this site is Blue Host which offers amongst many other feature 1 click install. There are of course many others. You should take a look at hosting WordPress for a more general discussion on choosing a host for your WordPress site.