What do You Name Your Homepage

You may or may not know that you really don’t need a home page per se. With WordPress you can set any page or your blog to be the landing page of your site.

But if you want a special page as a home page then don’t name the home page home. Why? Because home really isn’t a searchable term unless you’re looking for home page icons or pictures of houses.

So what do you name your homepage?

Why not take this opportunity to apply a little SEO (search engine optimization) to your site. It is especially important to do so on your homepage, after all that’s where search engines go first to index your site.

Here’s a real life example. The Julie Anderson home page is called Sculptural Ceramic Art of Julie Anderson

TIP: By default WordPress will use the actual name of the page when you add it to the menu. Once it’s in the menu open the menu item for editing and change the label to “Home” but leave the title attribute as the full-page name. NOTE: This will only work if your theme works with WordPress Menus

By putting some thought into what you name your homepage you will also have the start of a meta description unique to that page.

So what do you name your homepage? Provide us a link to see it in the comments below.

Don’t Remove Your Site Title – Hide It!

Most WordPress themes allow you to upload a header image, including ours. But your header image may also include your logo with a unique font style and color. Then once you upload it and check it out on the front end you see your image logo and your site title above it.

So you remove the site title and tag line by going to Settings > General which is a REALLY BIG MISTAKE!!!

artbiz-remove-site-title-wordpress-2 — Example of a header image and site title both active

You may think removing the site title this way solves the duplication of your site title and it does. But what happens is search engines no longer see your site title in the source code and site visitors don’t see your site title in browser tabs or bookmarks.

artbiz-remove-site-title-wordpress — How your site appears in the browser tab with the site title removed.

artbiz-remove-site-title-wordpress-eg — How your site will appear in peoples bookmarks.

The solution is to hide your site title so it doesn’t appear above your uploaded logo image but remains visible where you need it for search engines and visitors alike. Here’s how the proper way to remove your site title and tag line.

Go to Appearance > Customize
Click on Site Identity
Uncheck the box next to “Display Header Text”
Save your changes by clicking the blue button at the top that says “Save & Publish”

artbiz-remove-site-title-wordpress-step1 — Step 1 – Navigate to Appearance > Customize

artbiz-remove-site-title-wordpress-step2 — Step 2 – Uncheck the box to display header text

artbiz-remove-site-title-wordpress-3 — Site title and tag line are hidden from view

Now the site title will still appear where it is needed most and your new header image/logo is presented the way you want it with your site title hidden.

Footnote: There’s a new feature that will add add a favicon (website icon) that will appear in browsers and other apps. Cool! Thanks WordPress!

How to Open WordPress Menu Link in New Window

There’s a little known button concealed in the screen options menu that will allow you to have your links open in a new browser window.

Standard web practice is NOT to have links open in new windows as it is thought that in the end there would be to many windows open which will inconvenience the user.

It’s acceptable to have some external links, like social media open in new windows. Also links to documents like PDF’s is good practice to open in a new window.

So where is this mysterious function? Start by navigating to Appearance > Menus in the admin menu of your WordPress site.

Step 1

Step 2

screen-options — 2. Look up to the top right corner and click on the Screen Options tab

Step 3

show-on-screen — 3. Check the box next to Link Target by clicking on it

Step 4

menu-item — 4. Click on the menu item that you want to open in a new window and check the box next to “open link in a new window/tab”

It’s always easy when you know where things are.

The Blog Newsletter Combo Makes Art Blogging Easy

CONCEPT: The concept behind the blog newsletter combo is that content sent to followers in emails can also be blog posts. This will make creating content and art blogging easy.

After I settled into routine of blogging both here at Artbiz and my fine art site, I came up with one really good use for my art blog. I use my fine art blog as an archive for my exhibitions (here’s how to use your blog for exhibition history). It’s great because it provides a chronological listing of my exhibits with pictures, review links and I can write about it as much or as little as it want.

Now I have another idea on how you can use your art blog and not have to go through writers anxiety every time you feel it’s time to communicate with your followers. I call it your blog newsletter combo!

No doubt you have an email list to send out your studio news. You may even have a Mail Chimp or similar account that you use to send out your emails. If you don’t, get one, it’s free.

THE IDEA: Turn studio newsletter’s into a blog posts and use Mail Chimp to send it out automatically. Oh Yeah, we`re done here.

Well not quite. You probably wonder what makes good blog newsletter content. Here`s some ideas…

Show images of your studio, people love to see artist studios.
Document the stages of your work. This could also be turned into a how to article.
Take pictures and write about your visit to a local art show.
The opening of your show (see here’s how to use your blog for exhibition history), or an artist you admire.
Your fav art reading list.
Interview an artist you admire.
Take pictures of crating and shipping your work.
Ask collectors for images of your work in their home or office.
Ask for testimonials if you do commissions.

There’s so much you can write about that will let people into your mysterious life of an artist. You don’t have to do both a newsletter and a blog. Make art blogging easy by combining the two tasks into one.

What do you think, will you turn your newsletter into blog posts? Any other content ideas you wish to add?

How to Copy and Paste a Link

You will find many uses for it so I am going to show you How to Copy and Paste a Link URL.

First it would be handy to know some internet lingo, specifically URL. URL is an acronym for uniform resource locator which is basically a web address. So when I say copy and paste the URL you now know it’s the web address.

Where to find the URL

All pages on the internet have a unique URL which can be found in the address bar of the web browser.

How to copy a URL

1. Navigate to the page you want and copy the URL by highlighting it all with your mouse, right-click and copy. It is now copied to your clipboard.

2. Now navigate to where you want to paste the URL and right-click and paste.

It is important to know that pasting a URL does not automatically add a hyperlink to it. Nor should you be using a URL as the link text for a hyperlink. This is because most URL’s are not pretty and don’t have meaning. Read more about meaningful hyperlinks here.

Pasting a URL on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter will dynamically turn the URL into a hyperlink. That’s unique to them.

Now that you know where and what a URL is you’ll be able to copy and paste it in all sorts of places. I’m now going to copy the URL of this page and paste it into Facebook, you can too.

How to Add a Red Dot to Sold Art in WordPress

Artbiz receives the odd request asking if there is a way to put a red dot in the description of their images. Unfortunately NextGen Gallery doesn’t have that option and you’ll hard pressed to find a WordPress gallery plugin that does.

By the way, the red dot tells people who the work is sold. •

The reason it’s not a feature is probably because – unless you’re an artist or involved with the fine arts you’ll have no idea what the red dot means. That’s why writing sold or private collection or in the collection of... is standard practice for website image galleries.

But for those of you who really, really want to know how to do this I have this solution.

Using HTML to add a red dot to image descriptions in NextGen Gallery. Here goes…

First we need a dot. The best dot to use is a bullet created by keyboard command “alt + 7″ and gives you a bullet ” • ”

Once we have our ” • ” we need to style it. Make it red and make it bigger. This bit of code does just that, copy it from the screenshot below, highlighted in yellow.

Copy the above and paste it into the image description box inside NextGen Gallery as shown below and you’ll have the red dot.

red-dot-nextcellent-gallery — Screenshot of description box

Here’s a screenshot of the image as it will be seen by your site visitors once the thumbnail is enlarged.

If you feel strongly about knowing how to add a red dot to sold art then this will work. Otherwise writing “sold” or “private collection” is perfectly fine and doesn’t need explanation.