Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7
tip
If you're really clever, you can “steal” cool stuff for your static web pages from the WordPress Administration
area. (It's not really stealing; the information is yours, and WordPress is open source, so do as you like!)
For instance, the Users page in the WordPress Administration area, mentioned previously, includes links to all
the posts by a given author. It would be nice to have that in a static web page, wouldn't it?
Well, the link to all posts by a given author is just a WordPress database query like this one:
http://mygreatblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php?author=123456789
The query includes the underlying WordPress blog name and the unique author ID. If you use this URL in your
static web page, it will return the same list as it does when used within the WordPress Administration area.
You can reuse other such URLs from the Administration area and widgets to improve your static web pages.
Designing a Static Page
When you design a static page for WordPress, you don't really have control of the whole page. Your
new page appears within your blog's look and feel, and the sidebar or sidebars that are part of your
theme remain as well.
The good side of this is that WordPress still takes care of a lot of the HTML/XHTML complexities for
you, as they have to do with the code for the page as a whole; you only need to worry about what
appears on the page itself.
Your users also are likely to have fairly low expectations for the design of your static web page. In
fact, they probably expect your static web page to look like a blog entry, which is how they tend to
look in WordPress unless you put a fair amount of work into designing them to look different.
You do need to think about how your static pages relate to each
other. Try for a very simple model at first: Just have one level of
navigation with a single page per level. This extends your blog
while maintaining the simplicity that people expect from a blog.
When you start to have submenus of navigation, people have to
think about your blog as a website as well as thinking of it as a
blog. This can make the heads of your site visitors hurt. People
tend to avoid doing things that make their heads hurt, even if the
avoidance happens at a subconscious level. So don't do that or
they'll avoid your site.
If you create so many static web pages that you need sublevels of
navigation, that's fine, but it means you might need to redesign
your site as a static website that has at least one really excellent blog in it, rather than as true blog-
first blog. Develop or borrow the expertise needed to create a really good traditional website and go
for it.
tip
Use the Text widget (see Chapter
6, “Using HTML in Your Widgets
and Blog”) to create supplemen-
tary navigation for your site and
static web pages. This might be
more obvious and more conve-
nient for blog-oriented users
than the navigation that comes
with the theme you're using.
