Pro Blog Design

Let’s say you want to show thumbnails in your blog’s front page. A lot of blogs do that now and it’s a good way of making the page look more alive.

The only problem though is that using custom fields can be complicated and time-wasting. This post will show you how to make your theme generate thumbnails automatically, based on your post’s first image.

This trick is done by mixing some wordpress hacks and a php script. The PHP script is Darren Hoyt’s timthumb.php, the hack is WpRecipe’s how to get the first post image.

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With WordPress 2.7 came the post_class function. This gives a set of CSS classes to a post, depending on what’s in the post (e.g. based on what category it is in).
The code that you use in your template to use this is simply like this:

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<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>

While this is a fantastic [...]

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The title of your page (The few words in the very top bar of your browser window)  is arguably the most important thing search engines look at as they decide where to rank your page.

Most themes come with a very basic title set up; the name of your post and the name of the blog. It works well enough on regular post pages, but what about search pages, archives, 404s and all the others?

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In this tutorial, you will see how to display your sub-categories in an animated dropdown, and how to create similar dropdowns for sub-pages as well. You’ll even be able to highlight the page your reader is currently on.

The code is written by milo, and you  can see a demo of it in use in one of her free WordPress themes; Nash (Check out the two nav menus in the black header).

The code is very easy to set up and you will have no trouble there. You will want to edit the CSS in the end to make it match your theme, but even for beginners, a little meddling will get you through.

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It can be very tedious to navigate through a category on a WordPress blog. Your navigation options tend to be limited to “Next Page”/”Previous Page".

Not the most efficient method in the world…

When you do a search on Google, you can skip to page 3, 4, 5 or anything else. And once you do, you can always click back to page 1. It makes flicking through a large number of results much, much easier.

So, why don’t we recreate that in WordPress? Milo is going to show us how.

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The search page in a WordPress blog is normally a bit of an after-thought. I know that until I replaced the WordPress page here with a Google search page, my search results were just like any other category page.

You can do a lot to improve your search results page though. In this post, milo has shown us some of her best techniques for creating a far more useful page.

We will start by adding a counter for the number of results found, then we will highlight the search times in the results themselves, and finally, show you how you can exclude certain categories from your results.

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Often at the end of a TV show, they play some clips of what’s coming up in the next episode. It’s interesting to watch (Provided they don’t spoil things too much on you!), simple for them to do, and near enough guarantees you’ll remember to tune in again next time.

So why not do the same with your blog?

If you use WordPress’s future-posting to schedule your posts for a few days in advance, you can show parts of those posts on your blog beforehand to let people know there’s more to come.

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