Watch your Blog’s Tagline

I wanted to take a few moments today to address a very common situation that occurs after one first installs Wordpress and begins tinkering around with its themes and plug-ins.

Keep your Header and Tagline Synched

Wordpress is a snap to customize. Find a theme you like, upload and unzip it, then apply it and you’re done. Further customizations can be done in the theme editor or by editing the images that install with the theme.

Because it’s so easy, it’s very common to experiment with themes, jumping from theme to theme, attempting to find one that “fits” with the overall style of your blog. I gravitate towards newspaper themes, because they provide multiple template options, the front page can be easily customized, and because they are able to convey a lot of information and advertising in a small piece of real estate. By the way, be sure to check out the premium themes in Chapter 8 — many of those themes are very hard to track down, so you won’t find too many people using them.

The situation that I see very often is that a custom theme completely replaces the textual header that contains your blog name and headline. When you look at your blog, all looks well, because you see the header that shipped with the theme. The problem is in your RSS feed however, which pulls your blog description from the “Options” tab. This description is vital for folks who might be searching for relevant blogs at blog or RSS directory sites, so it’s important that you keep it updated.

The moral: always keep your tagline in the “Options” tab of your blog’s control panel in synch with the text that might be on any custom header you use.