Fran, may I suggest you focus on creating great content that attracts traffic to your blog first. Why is because I’ve seen too many people get lost in the “tweaking” and never get anywhere with their blogs. There will be plenty of time for SEO, etc…

You are so right Craig! last night I realized I spent hours messing with the problem
contact page and then the category problem and then the pages! I realized that
instead of the prospect of crowding the header bar with titles I could create one title
for all the pages…. so I have one Articles title in the bar now and I will add URLs to
articles I want to include… of course I won’t have them as extra pages on my blog
that way.

Thank you coach for the link! I bookmarked it and will consider after first concentrating on content and articles to write!

Fran
content as you suggested

If your content is good, people will tell others about you for sure.

Here is the solution to question http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress/choose-wordpress-pages-navigation-bar

But please, make your blog hyper focused on one topic and focus on creating good quality content you can be proud of and others will want to share.

I read something like that in the WP Codex > Pages, also the other way around
like setting the pages in the header bar and then changing that code… also
something about creating Templates… all over my head! I’ll follow your suggestion
and have it done… can you suggest someone?

I really do want to have that option… I’ve seen it used on other blogs to list Articles
and that would be adding pages to the blog which is a good thing for SEO I think?

Thanks Craig,

Fran

it goes something like this: You have to delete the code so no pages show up in the header. Then hard code the pages you want to show up such as home, contact, etc…

How bad do you want to do this? I think you can find someone on rentacoder.com to do it for ten dollars.

Craig

I want to use pages to add articles to my blog without having the titles
appear in the header title bar where I have About and Contact…

I went to WP Documentation and read some long tirades about accomplishing
that, including making changes to the code which scares me…

Of course I’ll have to do whatever it takes to get the result I want,
but I’m hoping you can tell me about some method that you have
already tested.

Fran
hoping that you have a tested method

I’m posting this here so someone else might benefit: so the problem was that
1. the post titles in the “recent posts” and the post titles themselves were sent to a HTTP404 which meant the exerpt wasn’t expanding.

2. the category titles in the sidebar were lining up the posts they connected to but
not expanding them…

I went to the WP forum and found a recent post about category problems after
upgrading from 2.7 to 2.7.1 – one answer suggested to check the permalink, so
I checked the permalink in my blog and…ta da…

the custom /%category%/%postname%.php that I inserted yesterday following
Craig’s excellent guide was missing the / between the 2 % in the middle, my
mistake… my excuse being that the font is very small in that WP line.

That missing little slash kept everything frozen in place… I’m amazed!

I can go back to posting now

Fran

went back to home page and everything was working fine.

By the way I was working with your excellent “Your First WP Blog” and ran into a problem with the contact page:

I got the URL “http://www.ApprenticeMarketerGazette.com/contact” as you said
and it opens the page BUT I get this message:

Fatal error: “Cannot access empty property in /home/magic90/public_html/apprenticemarketergazette/wp-includes/functions.php on line 452″

I’ve been trying to troubleshoot with no success so far and I’m going to shelve that
and go on with the rest of the installation and do some posting today…..

If you have an answer right off the bat I’d appreciate hearing it but in the meantime
thank you for your wonderful step by step instructions – I’m sure I must have messed
up somewhere!

I’ll start my category “Guest Article” with yours… does that sound OK?

Fran