Good things about WordPress: Search Box

You may have seen it already: Most WordPress blogs have a Search Box placed in their side bar or top bar. It looks neat, it looks cool, it looks integrated. That is because it IS integrated, because WordPress comes with a ready-made Search Box widget. In some themes it is part of the theme and cannot be moved or removed, which makes it look very integrated; in other themes you have to add it as a sidebar widget. TypePad does not have such a widget at all. On TypePad, you can have a Search Box, but it’s most likely a Google Custom Search, blatantly displaying the Google logo. Some might say it makes your blog look cheap. I would disagree. There’s nothing wrong with a Google Search Box, but it just doesn’t look the same.

The Search Box can take singular words or phrases; then it will look for all posts that contain either one of the words you are looking for, or your can enclose your “search phrase” in quotation marks like that and the search will look for a post containing the exact phrase.

To me that is definitely one of the features worth considering for a major pro-argument when moving from TypePad to WordPress.

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Good things about WordPress: Error 404 Page Not Found

One particular nice feature about WordPress is the so called error 404 Page not Found default page. What it means is that if for whatever reason a reader types in the wrong web address for a post on your blog, or if a Google search or some link on someone else’s web site still lists a post or page on your site that you have already deleted, the reader will not be met with a blank white page with no clue what to do, but will still find your blog. With this WordPress feature the visitor is more likely to stay on your blog and search for the missing post.