OK – so I’ve done a little more work today, so now you can see my face as well as my hat!
What I want to do is have the page currently titled ‘Welcome’ as the first page that is seen when you enter the site, and then have the page currently titled ‘Home’ retitled as ‘Blog’ on the next tab. But I don’t know how to do this, and there might be two problems:
a) I wonder if this can only be set up as you create the site;
b) It might not be possible to do it with this particular template.
It’s just that it’s what I want to do with the MU site once I can get it going, so I’d like to have this designed the same if possible so that when I get folk to come look what’s possible, it’s laid out like I expect to lay out the MU one… if you get my drift.
Ramtopsrac Creations 
Well, this morning I’ve managed to successfully change the order of the ‘pages’ but not to make ‘Welcome’ the home page, and push the ‘blog’ further down what one might call, the order of merit. So partial success.
Lots of ideas for pages and content this morning, so suspect I may spend much of today day fiddling with this.
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Having just fired off a brilliant piece of technical writing to Clara about their packages, almost exclusively courtesy of Alec, I note below excerpts of a “conversation” I’ve just had with him regarding the future use of the MU site, which this is (in part) a trail for. It will obviously influence how I use, and title, the material on this site too.
I wrote:
> I’ve blogged on my new wordpress thing, a question I don’t know how to solve – rather than repeat it, can you go look please and answer if you can.
Alec wrote:
I would caution you strongly AGAINST such an approach with the MU website; it’s “content management” thinking at work. The whole point of a blog is that the most recent stuff is at the top of the front page, and the sidebars work to provide access to the “static” content; what you propose is fine if the front page is just a big picture of the cathedral-and-smiling-bishop which anyone with a deeper interest will just click through, but if you are intending something “navigational” (with more than 1 link) then what inevitably happens is people start to lard the “welcome” page with fragile crap that suffers from “oh no we can’t possibly change that” syndrome.
Further: more and more people are moving to RSS readers for reading their blogs – if you have not done so, I strongly recommend visiting and setting up http://www.google.com/reader/ immediately to get a feel of what I mean – and “pages” are not going to be part of the RSS feed, any “breaking news” you put onto a “page” will be missed by the 60% of folk who subscribe to your RSS feed.
I can just imagine someone say “that’s so important it should go on the front page” and not realise that by doing so, it will get *less* coverage. Blog communications today are all about the feed, the channel, the flow… not the “page”.
I said:
I’m still thinking like a content manager. I think I know what it is though – there are significant amounts of content (static factual material) that needs to go up first for the regular users who need to ‘find stuff’ but then, yes, the blog of what is current, newsworthy etc. needs to be visible, even if it points elsewhere as stuff goes from being news => content
Alec said:
I would make the blog the home page because that’s kind-of the heartbeat of the whole thing, then a big sidebar button we can install / design with “ABOUT THE MOTHERS UNION WINCHESTER, HISTORY AND PEOPLE” –
make it so huge nobody can miss it and that links to the “about” page which is fully laden with interesting stuff and links to static content.
It’s always good to have multiple databases avialable in case you want to start hosting KitbumBlog or something –
more == better
basically an “unlimited databases” offer is best, whatever; that Clara are offering “1” is werid, because it is not clear whether that is a single table, or a database of many tables, but it is at best stingy and at worst a ripoff
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A note re font size from Alec (for future reference):
font size tends to be theme related – what people with browsers tend to do is set a font size in the browser, and then use Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to make it smaller; myself I would recommend looking for widgets that hack the CSS so you can “embiggen” the page upon demand – that sort of thing is easily possible – or if you want we can futz with the theme to set sometinhg permanently larger, although that tends to bite you in the foot eventually
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