Comments on: Tweaking WordPress: Home page tweaks

By: mike

mike

how is it possible to change my home button in wordpress to point to a different link?

i would love for you to answer this!

thanks!

By: Ruzanna

Ruzanna

thanks for the answer Brian, i am also using google xml sitemap creator and i have always been indexed in a few minuter after posting. ironically, after making changes to wordpress theme, everything went wrong. and the date of my 'blog' page was last updated is that very exact date when my site's appearance in serps went down.

By: Wordpress Brian

Wordpress Brian

Hi Ruzzana,

Are you using a plugin for the sitemap? I use the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin and have no problems with posts being displayed on Google searches 10 mins after being posted, despite the age of the 'blog page'.

I understand your point about the initial creation date of the page but I have never in all my studying of wordpress SEO heard of it being an issue.

By: Tom

Tom

Ok - thanks - I got the is_front_page() working... but when I use the tag for wp_get_recent_posts( '1' ) and then displaying the title - it is showing the title of the current page - not the most recent post. I will try to dig around more when I have another chance (after work, or tomorrow at lunch) but any other ideas on why I am pulling the static page title may help.

And - thanks for 'pointing me' - it helps to learn the codex more than just copy paste (albeit, not as easy)

By: Wordpress Brian

Wordpress Brian

Hi Tom,

Look up WordPress Conditional Tags - is_front_page()

Then find the Template Tag for recent post.

And glue it together!

Then put between 'divs' in the appropriate place in the index file.

By: Ruzanna

Ruzanna

Hi,

I have an onsite blog at http://www.criminaldefenseduilawyer.com/blog/ . This is a wordpress site where a static page is displayed on the homepage and the posts are going to a static page called 'blog'. The configurations are done within wordpress's configuration guidelines shown in this article.

The problem I am experiencing is that the 'blog' page is a static page and its last update date is an old date, the one when the page was last edited. However, I have posts coming to that page almost every day. So in reality it is being updated much more frequently. Please see the sitemap where for the last modified date: http://www.criminaldefenseduilawyer.com/sitemap.xml

I suspect that this confuses search engines and and they also see the blog page http://www.criminaldefenseduilawyer.com/blog/ last updated much earlier than the real date. This results in the fact that the category and tag pages are more popular than the blog page, while these are getting rarely updated compared with the http://www.criminaldefenseduilawyer.com/blog/ page.

My question is how can I use wordpress's functionality of displaying posts on a static page instead of the homepage and having a correct last modified date for that static page, so that the search engines also know that this page is being updated almost every day.

By: Vladimir

Vladimir

As I said in the email, yes it is possible to redirect 'home' to whatever you need to be there.

By: Vladimir

Vladimir

Nice catch, updated the post. Thanks.

By: Tom

Tom

I have a question along these lines, that I can't find an answer to...

I am using the a static page for my home page, but I would like to set a div above the start of that page's content with the title and possibly the excerpt to the most recent post (just one). I don't know the codex well enough to figure out how to make that info show up.

Is this an easy piece of code to implement?

By: Portland Web Company

Portland Web Company

Ya whoops... ill paste in an email good thing I copied before posting. Feel free to delete both comments...

By: Portland Web Company

Portland Web Company

Always good information, Vladimir! I do some of the WordPress stuff myself but usually outsource to code gurus like you, but I have a quick question I'd love to solve and it is inline with this article which also solves one of my problems on another site, so thank you and in advance for answering the question - I'll try to make it a yes or no for you...

In this same line
Home

Am I able to remove the link and replace it with my own to redirect the home page?
/

What I would love to see work is:
Home

My blog is seperate from the site, so I would love the Blog's Home button to actually go to the site home... is this how I would do it? I think I overworded the question - my apologies.

Thanks for all the good information!

By: Frank

Frank

Please: get_settings is deprecated in version 2.1 and i think, a new tutorial use the right functions: get_option or in your example: get_bloginfo or bloginfo without echo.

Sorry for my bad english.
Best regards