Creating the Front Page of Your Web Site

✦ Custom Fields: Custom fields add extra data to your page, and you can

fully configure them. You can read more about the Custom Fields feature
in WordPress in Book IV, Chapter 5.
✦ Discussion: Decide whether to let readers submit comments through the
comment system by selecting or deselecting the Allow Comments text
box. By default, the box is checked; uncheck it to disallow comments on
this page.
Typically, you don’t see a lot of static pages that have the Comments
feature enabled because pages offer static content that doesn’t generally
lend itself to a great deal of discussion. There are exceptions, however,
such as a Contact page, which might use the Comments feature as a way
for readers to get in touch with the site owner through that specific
page. Of course, the choice is yours to make based on the specific needs
of your Web site.
✦ Author: If you’re running a multi-author site, you can select the name of
the author you want to be attributed to this page. By default, your own
author name appears selected here.
✦ Publish: The publishing and privacy options for your post, which we
cover in Book IV, Chapter 1.
✦ Page Attributes: Select a parent for the page you’re publishing. In Book
III, Chapter 7, we cover the different archiving options, including the
ability to have a hierarchical structure for pages that create a navigation
of main pages and subpages (called parent and child pages).
✦ Page Template: Mentioned in the section “Creating the Front Page of
Your Web Site,” earlier in this chapter. You can assign the page template if you’re using a template other than the default one (Book VI, Chapter 7 contains more information about themes and templates, including using page templates on your site).
✦ Page Order: By default, this option is set to 0 (zero). You can enter in
a number, however, if you want this page to appear in a certain spot
on the page menu of your site. (If you’re using the built-in menu feature

in WordPress, you can use this option; but you don’t have to use it because you can define the order of pages and how they appear in your menu by assigning a number to the page order — for example, a page with the page order of 1 will appear first in your navigation menu, where a page with the page order of 2 will appear second, and so on.
✦ Featured Image: Some WordPress themes are configured to use an
image (photo) to represent each post that you have on your blog. The
image can appear on the home/front page, blog page, archives, or any-
where within the content display on your Web site. If you’re using a
theme that has this option, you can easily define a post’s thumbnail by clicking the Set Featured Image link below the Featured Image module on the Add New Post page. Then you can assign an image that you’ve uploaded to your site as the featured image for a particular post.