A Place For Stephen

There’s one more change I would make to the default template before I’d say it was ready for public consumption.

And that’s the removal of a couple of things on the sidebar… down the right hand side, at the bottom, under the META heading.

I don’t like wasting important navigation space, and there’s some superfluous things there that are taking up space!

The links that are currently there are:

1. Register / Username
   
2. Login / Logout
   
3. Valid XHTML
   
4. XFN
   
5. WordPress
   

I want to remove the last three so to do that, get into WordPress ADMIN, click on PRESENTATION, and then THEME EDITOR.

These items are in the file called SIDEBAR - so find it - in the RHS list - and click on it to put it in the editing box.

Now, scroll down until you find the line <li><h2>Meta</h2>

Just AFTER that, you should be able to easy locate these three lines we don’t want.

<li><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="This page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional">Valid <abbr title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</abbr></a></li>
<li><a href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/"><abbr title="XHTML Friends Network">XFN</abbr></a></li>
<li><a href="http://wordpress.org/" title="Powered by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.">WordPress</a></li>


and carefully DELETE them.

Then click the UPDATE FILE button.

And that’s it.

So why remove them?

Apart from the space considerations, what does “Valid XHTML” or “XFN” really mean to the average person? Not much, so why link to it?

And I killed the WordPress link from here because it appears AGAIN in the footer/bottom of the template… I certainly don’t need it TWICE on every page… in fact, ask yourself whether you really need it in the first place?

Finally… the default Word Press template is really ready for the world.

Now it’s time to find the essential plug-ins which will enhance our template somewhat and make life a little easier. More on that shortly.

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