Adding Blog page to website

Welcome to the WP community! You use both. From the dashboard admin bar at top, select “New > Post”. From there I believe there is an “Edit with Elementor” pick.

I think you may want to be adding new pages if you want them all linked from the nav menu. They do not show up in archive lists, but that is relatively easy to change with a bit of code. Pages are the only thing that WP will automatically add to nav menus.

I’m assuming your pages will be relatively limited. You don’t want dozens of menu items on the main menu level. Usually there are soon many dozens of blog post entries, so having them all in the menu quickly becomes cumbersome. If you want the menu to have sub-menus which can better lead to many posts or pages, it needs to be manually constructed.

You can also set a specific page to be the front page in settings so the first thing visitors see is a page instead of an archive list. This page is not necessarily “static” even though that is what it is called in settings. Its template can dynamically do all manner of things if programmed to do so.

Thanks for the heads up, previous to your reply I managed to get a blog page made, and have dropped the idea of having it accessible from the main menu.
Instead, I have added another section on my home page which displays the posts with the option to read more. I hope this works ok under the hood as it were.

One question raised by doing that, as more posts are added the section will get too long, can I limit that? and how would the reader then find the older posts?

Thanks again

Following on from that I found the Post Except widget and placed that on the page, but I cannot get it to show anything

I’m not familiar with that excerpt widget. It’s likely not working because the page uses a custom query to show posts. Such widgets often assume they should operate on the main query. Whatever code is causing the posts to be output could be modified to show excerpts instead of full content.

You can limit how many posts get listed by modifying the query args used. The query defaults to whatever the post per page setting is in your admin settings. The problem is dealing with pagination to get to subsequent posts. Like widgets, most pagination functions usually assume they operate on the main query. With custom queries you have to somewhat manage the pagination yourself. The function paginate_links() can output usable pagination links, but the query must be modified to work with the links it generates. There are some good examples in the User Notes at the bottom of the linked docs page.

Hi, thanks for your reply, being a new user to WP a lot of what you were saying went over my head as I try to learn the WP way.
However I managed to get the Elementor excerpt widget working and all is now fine, I think I may have confused myself somewhere as I set it all up again and it worked.
Thanks again.