Easy Archive Pages with Some Wordpress Themes

I built a copy of new sites within the past two weeks using a theme I found on Wordpress.org called the CopyBlogger theme. This is the theme used and distributed by the popular copy writers on the blog CopyBlogger.com. An interesting aside is that the site promotes another common theme called Thesis in the most prominent ad position on the site. With the default installation of the CopyBlogger theme you are provided with three links below the header for  Home, About, and Archives. The Home link is the only one that works prior to you creating pages names appropriately for About and Archives. See the site Debt Consolidation 2U for an example.

The About page is a common page on websites with a quick one to two paragraph description of the site, company or blogger. The Archives page is something entirely different. I initially had both the About and the Archives page redirect back to the Home page to avoid a 404 error. Then I stumbled upon a post on DailyBlogTips.com discussing a plugin that will provide a nice Archives page for any Wordpress blog. The plugin installed well enough but didn’t produce any archive links. But in the process, I discovered that many themes have a default Archives template that can be used easily for an Archives page. Who knew?

Create a new page, make the title of the page Archives (or something similar), and select Archives as the template for the page. When you publish your new Wordpress page, some form of archives links will be available to users and search engine bots. If your theme does not have a template for Archives, then your new page will not have this option and you will have to find a different way to create an Archives page. Other interesting templates include links and a sitemap. I like the ideal of moving the archive links away from the sidebar and onto a separate page. Makes the links on the homepage more SEO worthwhile.