After setting up this WordPress blog, I noticed the URLs my posts were given were absolutely terrible.  In no way did they show any valuable information about what the page displayed.  For instance, here is what the URL of my previous post looked like before I updated them “http://www.thetimbanks.com/?p=15”.  If you saw that as a user you would have no idea what is going to be on that page.

After going through some of the settings in the WordPress administration, I came across the “Permalinks” section.  I have to admit, WordPress makes it really easy to change the structure of your blog URLs.  On the settings page there are 4 structures already setup for you to select from and there is a custom option as well.  The option I opted for was the “Day and Name” option which shows the date and the blog post title in the URL.  Now the URL for the previous post looks like “https://thetimbanks.com/2009/09/22/jquery-custom-selector-for-selecting-elements-by-exact-text-textequals/” which now gives the date the post was published on and the post title.

If you plan on using the custom option you may want to take a look at the WordPress Codex page on using permalink structure.  There are some tags on that page that aren’t used on any of the default options that may help you out.