If you have a blog that’s installed in a folder on your site, and you add valuable content to it regularly, you may want to use some of that content in different places on your site.

For example, on your home page you could have the latest entries appearing - or some of the oldest if you wanted to breathe a bit of new life into posts that you wrote some time ago.

Of course if you install your blog directly into the root of your domain this doesn’t really apply to you because your posts will show up there anyway.

But if you have your blog elsewhere it’s a great way to freshen up your home page every time you make a new post. I’ve just added that to my own home page and it works a treat. I had to do a little reading up on it to find out how to do it and found this page quite helpful: corvidworks.com

I actually had to modify the example code a little because it didn’t work for me. I used <?php endif; ?>
rather than <?php endwhile; ?>

You can see the effect on my home page. I’ve set the display to show 3 excerpts with links to the full post. If you wanted you could put the full post, but it seems more sensible to me to give a taste of the post and then let the user decide whether to read more.

It’s not limited to the home page. You can display blog entries on any of the pages on your site, so if you focus on a particular topic you can point your visitors to other, pertinent information.

And last, but not least, there’s a definite SEO benefit to having regular fresh content on your home page. If you use the excerpt facility well and pull in a couple or three of your latest posts your page(s) will always look interesting