Change Your WordPress Tagline / Description
Your blog is not:
Just another WordPress.com weblog
OK, well, it might be … if you are an employee of WordPress. Changing your tagline, the text that appears under your blog title in the default theme Kubrick, is very easy to do; and, as of this writing cannot be done until you have finished creating your WordPress.com blog or installing your WordPress.org (read: self-hosted) blog.
For simplicity sake, we will start at the point right after you have created a WordPress.com blog and are looking at the sparklingly amazing theme of the future … Kubrick! Sarcasm aside, Kubrick is a great theme to use when addressing basic settings for your blog. Addressing settings for other themes would be better addressed on a theme-by-theme case (see below for more information).
Continuing with the premise of a current installation of WordPress 2.7, log into your dashboard via your “Site Admin” link. If your theme does not have a direct link to your dashboard you can append wp-admin to the base URL of your blog to reach the login screen.
For example: <Your-Blog-URL>/wp-admin
Scroll down, if necessary, until you see the link for “Settings” and click on it to open the General Settings page. The second box of information is your Tagline text, or in other terms your blog’s description. Change the text to something that is more appropriate for your blog; scroll down to the bottom of the page; and, click on the Save Changes button. That’s it. Your done!
Your blog is no longer:
Just another WordPress.com weblog
For self hosted WordPress installations you may or may not see your Tagline depending on which theme you have chosen to use. The Tagline text can be displayed in many ways but a basic WordPress PHP construct that can be used in themes is this:
<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
Where ‘description’ (without the single quotes) is the variable that holds the text from the Tagline box in your General Settings page. Remember to just change your Tagline; and, a properly coded theme will do the rest for you.
Have you changed your tagline today?
© 2009, Edward Caissie. All rights reserved.
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8 Comments
hey this is a very interesting article!
Thank you. It was something that came up in a recent forum discussion at http://wptavern.com/
Hey thanks for the info as I created a video on this but since the updates it has changed and well now I know I need to go in and redo the video for my students in my marketing course
Thanks!
.-= Joel for Change ID´s last blog ..Reverse Phone Lookup Business =-.
Just added a TinyURL for this page ( http://tinyurl.com/wp-tagline ). Enjoy!
I need the taglineunder the blog title to wrap to two lines and at a specific point. Is that possible? I tried HTNL code at the point but it didn’t didn’t seem to work from the General settings page.
@Doug – Currently the tagline does not accept anything for output except standard text. This is an issue I have been reviewing for a while as a potential plugin idea. I’ll let you know if I get back to the project and complete the idea.
I found a trick but I had to edit the header file. I removed the PHP call to bloginfo and the description entirely and added a line break and html code to make the fint a different color. Works great for the moment.
@Doug – yes, hard-coding your description will work most every time. Just remember, if you update the theme it will likely require you to re-edit the header.php template file.