How to customize the “Pages” box at footer
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Hi at the bottom of my site (DearCameron.com) There’s three boxes. Amongst these there’s one entitled Pages. How can I customize it so it won’t be as long? Thank you :)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Looks like instead of writing blog Posts you’ve written Pages.
Since you’re using the Pages widget, and none of the pages are subordinate to one another, you’re sort of stuck. You could put it in a side sidebar if you had a theme with that option.
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With you doing entries nearly every day and sometimes more than one, using pages is as you are learning going to get very messy very fast. You need to convert over and use posts instead otherwise by the end of the first year you are going to have a pages widget probably over 365 pages long.
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Just take the pages widget out of the footer bar and move it to the sidebar and move some of the stuff in the sidebar into the footer. Seriously though, using pages for your main content is NOT a good idea.
For some types of sites, pages may actually be the best way of presenting the material, but wordpress.COM is aimed at blogging and using pages for your content has drawbacks you need to be aware of:
1. Pages will show up lower in search engine results because search engines place lower emphasis on pages. Pages are meant for static content.
2. When you publish a post, wordpress automatically “pings” all the major search engines to let them know you have published a new post so that they can index it. When you publish a page, wordpress does NOT “ping” the search engines. You will have to ping manually at a service such as pingomatic.com or wait for the search engines to find the page on their own when they make a scheduled crawl of your site.
3. Only posts show up on an RSS feed, pages do not. That means people cannot subscribe to your blog so that they are alerted when you add something new. Pages also do not show up for email subscriptions, only posts do, so any new content you add via a page does not go out to your subscribers.
4. You can assign categories and tags to posts to help the search engines properly place you in search results. Pages cannot have tags or categories as they sit outside the blog structure which means your stuff will also not show up in the wordpress.COM global tags pages. For most people the global tags pages are responsible for bringing a lot of visitors to their blogs.
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A question: What are you going to do when you have two or three years of pages listed in the sidebar (700 to 1000 pages)? Do you really, seriously thing anyone is going to spend their time scrolling down through and reading 1000 titles to see if there is something that they want to see?
Also note that the wordpress blog search feature (at the top of your sidebar) does not search pages. It only searches posts, so the search feature is not going to help people find things you have put on pages.
You are boxing yourself into a corner I’m afraid (my opinion).
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I would seriously consider starting to do that. Perhaps a few per day until you get them all transferred over to posts. In the end that is going to be much better for you especially from a search engine standpoint, and for letting people find things they are interested in more easily. As you get the pages transferred over to posts, set the corresponding page back to draft and save them till everything is moved over and working well.
You can back-date the posts to match the page publishing dates as explained here.
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Also make sure and categorize and tag the new posts appropriately. Use a maximum of 10 total tags and categories (number of tags + number of categories = 10).
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Also: I do this just kind of as a hobby… I post them online because a small amount of my readers were requesting it. Whether they read every single one doesn’t really matter to me.. I’m not that tech savvy so please bear with me :)
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Also on naming the posts, don’t include the date. Posts will automatically have the date displayed and it will be part of the URL as well. I would suggest something like
“Dear Cameron: Why did my fingers turn blue”
You get my drift? Use a title that is going to hint at the content of that post.
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You’re welcome and good luck. I think doing it this way is going to serve you well down the road and better to do it now than after the blog is a year or two old. Much less work at this point.
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There is a “posts” module in the custom menu page. Add them just like you would a page. Again though, you are not going to want to add all them to the top navigation as it will again get to be unwieldy.
What about setting up tabs for a certain year and then underneath that in dropdowns links to the monthly archives? In other words, You would have a tab for 2010 and 2011 and then a sub menu item under each of those for December, November, etc.
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The other thing to remember is that if you categorize and tag the posts appropriately, then the people can use the tags and categories widgets to get to listings of the posts on that subject.
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