Frankly, I have never taught of nor have I learned how to display pages as excerpts in the homepage. That would be quite cool of we are using our blog as a CMS where we have individual pages displaying different information.

Under normal circumstances, we only display excerpts to our posts in our front page and the thumbnails will be displayed with the excerpts to make it more attractive.

If you do that, then the thumbnails have to be re-sized manually and uploaded individually as a different image.

Anyway, this tip is already out-dated with the release of WP 2.9. You can now post thumbnails automatically of your Theme is fully 2.9 compatible.

Your second question, I am also confused but I assume you mean on post pages and not sites. If you do not want any images, do not fill in the custom field when you post. If the custom filed is empty, then there should not be any images appearing.

another thing is, on sites that have no custom fields with images in them, theres a broken pic icon showing.. any way to work arround that?

tia bsteck

There are some plugins to do that automatically but you have to look it up yourself. I never bothered because I don’t see the need for it.

Some Themes like the Thesis, does this by default.

Please refer to an old post of mine where I discussed this issue.

http://blogigs.com/a-dateless-wordpress-theme-for-niche-blogging/