Once you start to receive comments on your blog you’re going to want to have your comments stand out above the crowd, after all, it is your site! You’ll notice here on Blogging Tips that if the author of the post leaves a comment on their post then it stands out with white text on a red background compared to all the other comments with black text on a white background. Whilst there are a couple of plugins out there that can do this job for you, they’re not really…

There are a few plugins out there to give you greater ease over your page titles - SEO Title Tag, All-in-one SEO pack are just a couple of the more popular ones.

However, I don’t believe a standard blog necessarily needs these unless you have more than the basic static pages, as your post titles should be sufficiently well written anyway. The one page that does need a good title is your front page, yet for some reason the developers of the 2 templates that come with WordPress seem to have neglected…

These days sidebars get so easily cluttered with recent posts, categories and tags, recent comments, top commentators etc. The list is endless. Throw in your blogroll and your sidebar can become longer than the page content!

Moving your blogroll into its own page can keep things neater and allow you to have a longer list that doesn’t clutter up your sidebar. The way to do this is with a page template.

Creating a Page Template

Your theme may or may not have a page.php file already in it. If it does then open…

When new visitors come to your site via an internal page they won’t see the most recent posts you’ve written without having to go to the front page. If there’s nothing to entice them further into the site then they’ll leave just as quick as they came. So you want to put your latest posts in their face pretty much!

In WordPress this is easily done using the get_posts() template tag. The basic usage of this tag is

< ?php
$myposts = get_posts();
foreach ($myposts as $post) : ?>
     <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><…

At first, most bloggers don’t consider the need for a static page. Maybe one that has some about details on, but nothing more. As time goes on they may add one or two more pages, then a couple more. If they’ve stuck with the same theme then they’re most likely manually coding in the page links into their site, or they come manually coded in the case of some of the free themes available. Good idea? Well not necessarily, not if you intend to maybe change the page slug, or…