Posts – updates to the site
- Podcast posts
- Reviews
- Event reports
- Almost anything you can think of
Pages – a small collection of static utilities
- Bio pages
- Placeholders for the homepage gallery (which are redirected to posts)
- Contact Us page
- Guides like this
More Tags
- Website readership goes up if people see more posts on the homepage before they have to scroll down
- People skip articles if the intro doesn’t interest them anyway
- The more tag can turn an interesting intro into an enticing cliffhanger
- Super short posts don’t need a more tag, that would be silly
Conventions (conventions are fun :-)
- Peek at existing posts for format conventions, based on the sort of post needed
- No signatures – posts have sassy author names right at the top (pics too, soon)
- No contact info if it’s Bad Wilf info – the menus and sidebar are lousy with the stuff
Menus
- It’s all Custom Links – easy to maintain and the label can be made to look better in the menu than the post’s own title
- Deep or long menus are clumsy for the growing mobile user base
- Keep menus trim by recycling old menu items when possible
- Some of the Custom Links point to categories – by Grabthar’s Hammer, what a space savings!
Capitalisation
Never write titles in all caps. The website changes many titles to all caps but not for reals – it’s just a display setting.
A title written in mixed case can be displayed as all caps or all lowercase easily, but the system can never guess what the all caps text is supposed to look like in cases where caps aren’t wanted: THE UNIT FILES would be changed to The Unit Files or The unit files instead of the correct text, The UNIT Files.
Headlines and Titles
Journalists love to debate where upstyle and downstyle should be used. Begrudgingly, they tend to agree these are common:
- Sentence-like headline in downstyle Doctor Who shocker
- The Technically Downstyle DVD review
- Episode 42: The Owls of Upstyle
Homepage Gallery
- Copy the URL of a Post
- Make a Page (or recycle one already in the gallery)
- Write in the page what you want shown in the Gallery
- Add a square image to the Featured Image widget: make sure it’s 300×300 or scaled down to that size
- Paste the Post’s URL into the Page Links To widget
- Publish or Update the Page
- Add the Page’s ID number to Appearance > BusinessStyle Theme Options > Featured Posts > Page IDs
For reference, consider adding a More Tag with the Word ‘Placeholder’ underneath. The word won’t show up in the gallery, but it will clue in future editors that the page is just a placeholder for a post.