In effort to continue making all of our sites more customizable, we have just released some great new options for your blog pages.

Sidebar or no sidebar?

All blog pages (including all our blog-only themes) can now choose to have the sidebar on the left or right side of the page, or a fullscreen blog area with no sidebar at all.

Widgets At the Bottom

In addition, you can add a brand new customizable widget are to the bottom of the blog pages. It has three areas – left, right and center, allowing you to add widgets wherever you want.

And that’s not all….

You can also choose whether your blog will display the entire content of each post, or just a brief excerpt. With the full content, you get to see everything, including the images. With just the excerpt, it is only the first 150 words, making for a cleaner page and a faster page load speed.

Not enough???

How about the choice of whether to include the “Follow Us” links in the sidebar? Or the ability to change what the title of that section is?

A look at the Options Page

Here is a quick look at our cool new Blog Options page:

Some Possible Layouts

LEFT: Full content, Sidebar to the left — CENTER: Excerpts with sidebar on right — RIGHT: No Sidebar with excerpts and Widget Area added to bottom

LEFT: Excerpts with Sidebar on left and Widget Area at bottom — CENTER: Excerpts with sidebar on right and Widget Area at bottom– RIGHT: Full Content, Sidebar on right

How to Customize your blog

Login to your site and look under “BlogSite Options->Blog Page Options”. Easy as that.

Feedback

With any new feature, we are hoping to hear feedback. But with this one there is a lot of room for each site to make it their own, especially in the widget areas, where you can add such a variety of content, it is impossible for us to guess everything you might add. If you try anything and it doesn’t look quite right, let us know and we’ll fix it for you.

And as always keep the ideas coming so we can keep building in new features…

Next up – all kinds of options for the home page!

You can change the structure of your site and organize it better by grouping pages together.

As you edit any page, you can choose a “Parent” page, placing the current page in a group under that “Parent” page.

An example of this can be seen on our Support Site, where we use pages for all of our documentation.

As you edit any page, look over to the right under the “Publish/Update” button for the “Page Attributes” area.

Select the drop-down under “Parent”. A menu listing all of your existing pages will appear. You can see by the indentation, which pages are currently under other “parent” pages. Select the page you want to group this one under.

After you publish the page, you will see that the pages in the admin area get indented and grouped together the way you sorted them.

On the live site, pages grouped together will end up in drop down menus (for themes that use them).

WordPress provides some easy ways to embed video anywhere on your site. On PhotographyBlogSites, we have provided a few more ways to make it even easier.

You can place video:

• On the home page
• As the entire content area of any page
• On the side of any post or page, alongside any text content.
• Or directly within any page content

Read more about Adding Video to Your Site.

Did you know you can schedule your posts to be published at any time in the future? This is a great way to save time.

How to use it

You can sit down once, right several posts and have them go out later in the week or later in the month.
Have an event coming up that you want to announce a week ahead of time? Why chance forgetting to post about it? Write something quick now and schedule it for the right date.
Do a “picture-a-day” blog (or a Tip of the Day blog – hint,hint…) and setup posts for the next week.

Do you really think we remember to post everyday? No way. This whole section is scheduled ahead of time.

How to Schedule a Post

Just like Password Protecting a Post, the settings for scheduling a post are over to the right, near the Publish/Update button.

Usually it says, “Publish Immediately”. Click “Edit”. You can select any date and even a specific time to have the post go live.

After you set your day and time, hit “Ok”. “Publish” will change to “Schedule”. Hit “Schedule”. All set.

Did you know you can password protect any page or post in WordPress?

Just look over to the right as you edit any page. Under the Publishing area, you will see a section for “Visibility”.

Simply select “Password protected” and choose a password.

The content of the page will now be hidden unless you know the password.