One of the powers of WordPress has always been its custom Pages feature. It’s one of the least understood, most under-utilized, and most often misused feature WP has. In order to harness the power of WordPress, and to drive a non-blog site, understanding and exploiting custom Page templates is essential. I’ll show you here how to create a custom WordPress Page and show you some examples of how we’ve used custom Page templates in our clients’ web sites.

You can read more about WordPress Pages in the WordPress Codex, but in a nutshell, just remember that Pages aren’t generally meant to contain post information. They are used to contain static content on your web site. And since you can’t generally place live PHP code into the “content” area of a Page or Post without a plugin, if you have this type of code in your static content, the solution is to place that code into a special Page template. There are as many ways to use WP’s custom Page templates as your imagination allows. So let’s create a new Page template now, shall we?

Years ago, there was a great WordPress plugin, Image Headlines, that used True Type Fonts and image replacement to generate gorgeous titles on your blog using the fonts of your choosing. This ensured that your site’s viewers saw the fonts you wanted them to see. That plugin hasn’t kept pace with WordPress’s new releases. But TTFTitles has. It’s a great plugin, quite similar in operation to Image Headlines. The author is quite busy and has promised a “cookbook” of codes for quite some time but hasn’t gotten around to it. I’ve been playing around with this plugin while developing a site for a client. I thought I’d share with you the code that works for me.