Growing a website – day 4

Reading lots of the WordPress lessons and finding out how to do a few things as I go.  I’ve now made my Links page work by use of templates, enabled inclusion of email address without typing it in and discovered how to split a post.

  1. Downloaded a Plugin safeInclude, to enable me to include files repeatedly within posts, simply by storing them in a specific location and referencing them within the post by their filename surrounded by double {}.  I’m using this immediately to include the admin email address without having to type it in (which makes it available for email “harvesting” by unscrupulous spammers).
  2. Created a links.php template for this theme and then edited it to make it similar to the other templates within the theme.
  3. Learned how to split a post so it creates a teaser on the front page and then more detail in the actual blog page.
  4. Also learned about the Post Slug – I think it it a sensibly short name for your post which is used as the link title – and you can change it if you don’t like what WordPress chooses.

Still wondering about the best structure for my “typical” website.  The structure is fairly clear:-

  • Updatable home page – top level
  • Other “static” pages such as about, contact, links, services – these are the second level items
  • Perhaps some sub-pages to the static pages, such as detail about individual services – these would be third level
  • Blog – also a second level item, with all of the blog sub-directories as appropriately lower level items of the blog

The question is what structure to use within WordPress to implement that?

  • WP as top level or within a subdirectory?
  • Home page as a blog page or a “static” page?
  • Can you have two different blog formats, one for the home page (and perhaps a few other pages), one for the blog proper?
  • Or is it more sensible just to use the “static” format pages for the home page and edit it from time to time as needed?

Time: 3 hours