wp_title() empty on a static front page

I’m trying to use wp_title() to create a heading for my pages, but I’m using a static front page and, while all of the other pages render the title properly, the front page won’t.

This is what I’m working with:

<div id="main-content">
    <h1><?php wp_title("", true); ?></h1>
    <?php while( have_posts() ) : the_post() ?>
        <div class="pagecontent">
            <?php the_content(); ?>
        </div>
    <?php endwhile ?>   
</div>

Initially I thought that the front page might be drawing from index.php, so I added the same code snippet in there – but, no such luck, the same thing gets rendered – an empty h1 tag.

What’s going on here? I want the title of the page to show up in the h1 tag.

wp_title() is for the html title tags in your websites head section.

It’s not for outputting a title. Use the_title(), or get_the_title(),