The titling package provides a number of facilities that
permit manipulation of the appearance of a \maketitle command, the
\thanks commands within it, and so on. The package also defines a
titlingpage environment, that offers something in between the
standard classes' titlepage option and the titlepage
environment, and is itself somewhat configurable.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=titlsty