One of the least used and most powerful features of wordpress is the page template. The page template to make a long story short integrates non standard coding into your blog seemlessly. It is probably used most often as an archive page in free themes, but most of those free templates forget to tell their users how to use the template and therefore it goes unused. They can be used for so many other things than just an archive page though.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger makes extensive use of page templates. If you look at the beautifully designed landing page you will find a lot of information all packed neatly into one space. If this were a standard freebie theme you wouldn’t be able to see much more than this. It is my esitmation that his home page is home.php rather than the standard index.php. (for more information see the the wordpress codex on) By making use of the home.php as a landing page in your theme you can then make a blog template that will display all of the posts in a nice chronological order. This is especially nice on multiple author blogs like ProBlogger. I know some of you are thinking isn’t this just an archive page? The answer is no. A good archive page should give you little more than a quick excerpt of the post. My preference for an archive page is nothing more a link to the posts.

Here are a few more places where I make use of page templates since I am having a hard time actually finding other good uses of them at the moment. This page makes use of the Pandora Internet Radio Widgets on a single page rather than a sidebar present throughout my blog. The contact form on the Free Online Music Articles site makes use of the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form by Mike Cherim & Mike Jolley. Most of the other pages on this blog utilize my standard article directory information with the automatic pulls from the blog’s information. It saves needing to write these over and over again for different sites utilizing that or similar template. Plop the info into a template and it puts in all of the correct information. Another popular or should be popular page template is the sitemap. If you look at it there is a sextion for my pages, not all of which are listed on the landing page header. You get a list of my categories with how many posts are in each category. Then there is a listing of the ten latest posts in each category. If there were mutlpile authors to this blog you would find a listing of the ten latest posts from each author as well. Notice, this page template has absoluetely nothing to do with your google xml sitemap.

In the end if you are capable of doing simple theme editing you can create a wealth of useful pages not possible in your standard blog layout. If you aren’t so handy with the coding, try looking for themes that provide you with more template oportunities. Not only wiil they create a better reading experience many of the them will improve your SEO.

Permalinks for those of you who don’t know are just what they sound like, permanent links to everything in your blog. The WordPress default, which I have temporarily reverted too, looks something like this http://domain.com/?p=123. Prettier examples look like http://domain.com/2008/04/18/sample-post/ or http://domain.com/category/sample-post/ There are however problems when making this switch on occasion as I am finding out again. Just because your post time works doesn’t mean everything else is working fine and dandy, so be very careful how to change things and test everything.

If anyone has plugin suggestions or comments to restore my pretty permalinks now would be the time to feel superior and hand over that knowledge to BlogBoy. In light of that there will be a thorough post on permalink plugins once I get everything figured out on my own.

WordPress Permalink Documentation

Here is your daily round up of everything you should have read today, but didn’t because you were jerking all morning, napped this afternoon, farted around with your new theme project this evening, watched idol, blogged about idol, wondered where all this traffic came from on The Other Blog, fooled around some more with your theme and then wondered what you were going to post today over in Blog Boy. i suppose I could have twitted all that today.

Mani at The Daily SEO Blog brought us Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability

Darren blogged on branding your blog with your name in The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog

Last but not least Sara gives us a very appropriate post on tax day in Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance