Updateable Home Page

What I want is an updateable home page and a set of subsidiary pages, including a subsidiary blog (with the typical blog front page).

It seems that this combination is not formally supported within WordPress.  So, there are a few options I can choose from:

  1. Use the WordPress blog home page as my home page and modify its layout to look the way I want by means of a home.php template.  See Installing WordPress in its own Directory and Template Hierarchy. This is the method I have started with and I’ve now ground to a halt when trying to maintain the Blog page too.  Maybe there is a way to link to the standard blog index page but I haven’t managed it yet.
  2. Create a WordPress Static Page as the home page and keep the Blog, with its originally formatted home page, as the Blog home page in the subdirectoryCreating a Static Front Page might help to clarify how to do that, although I’d still like to maintain some editability.  In fact, this turns out to be essentially no different from option 1, except that it uses a Static front page, rather than a version of the Blog front page.  It still has the problem that WordPress does not seem to support both together.
  3. Use 2 Blogs! – see Installing Multiple Blogs
  4. Install WordPress in its own directory as the Blog and integrate it with a separately created site.  See this tutorial for some help on that, especially the admin changes.
  5. I have found a fifth option, which is one contributor’s way around the “both Home page and Blog page” problem.  This seems quite straightforward and I have made a slight modification of my own so that the actual home page code remains in the home.php template and does not have to be put in a separate page.   Now all that remains is to manage to links to the Blog neatly.