Business Blogging 101 — Free WordPress Tutorials — New to This Site? Start Here:

Welcome to Free WordPress Tutorials – Business Blogging 101! This video is an introduction to the Business Blogging 101 website, a site dedicated to free tutorials and support for WordPress created by Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications.

Free, Easy WordPress Tutorials

These are all easy WordPress tutorials and they are all free! Whether you have a WordPress blog or a WordPress website, most of the tutorials are for beginners, but there are intermediate-level tutorials and discussion about advanced techniques for WordPress including how to customize a WordPress theme, recommendations about the best WordPress plugins and themes, hacks and workarounds for WordPress using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), PHP and HTML – and much, much more! 😉

There are a few advanced tutorials. The tutorials’ degree of difficulty is determined by the amount of skill and experience you need with HTML, CSS and in some cases PHP code. If you don’t have experience with these, don’t worry! That’s the beauty of WordPress.

On this site, you will learn about WordPress, Blogging and Online Marketing, including Search Engine Optimization. Ask questions, comment and connect with other WordPress users.

You can use the video player control bar buttons to watch in HD and to watch in full screen mode.

You can become a fan of Business Blogging 101 on Facebook. And follow Mark McLaren and McBuzz on Twitter.

WordPress HTML Editing Window – Can I Have More Control Over My Pages and Posts?

A reader offered the following comment/question today about the WordPress HTML Editing Window.

I’m frustrated with the WP editor. I’m used to Dreamweaver and having lots of html coding available to me, along with design view. I find that the html view of WP jumps around, doesn’t take me to where I was in the design view, is limiting on features, increases or decreases spacing between lines on me once posted, and is generally frustrating. It won’t even underline properly.

Do you have any suggestions about an outside editor for WP??

Here’s my answer:

@energeticnutrition
Thanks for your question. It’s something that I’m hearing more often these days. In general, it’s the idea that people want more control over their pages and posts.

Bloggers in the traditional sense are not the ones calling for this. It’s usually businesses, independent consultants and professionals that are using WordPress for full-blown websites.

What most people seem to want is a WYSIWYG editor that will allow them to do more with layout and styling using the Visual editing window. For that, there are several solutions. The most popular is TinyMCE Advanced WordPress Plugin.

But what you are asking for is more control over the HTML. This is tricky.

On the one hand, you have just about as much control as your HTML and CSS skills allow, but practically speaking it’s a pain. You can paste all kinds of code into the HTML window. For this, I usually use an external HTML editor. Dreamweaver works fine. There’s a free editor on the Business Blogging 101 Resources page. You can’t preview your work in Dreamweaver, however, unless you go through some other technical setup. Not worth it, imo. You can paste the HTML into the WP editor and save the changes, then view the page. The more complicated your HTML, the more tedious it gets!

The other thing you have to contend with is that your WordPress theme may conflict with the CSS you use in your hand-coded HTML. My guess is that the problem you cite with underlining is due to such a conflict. If the conflicts are very disruptive or they don’t allow you to do what you want at all, you may need to edit your style.css or other CSS files.

If you want to simplify the editing process and see how things work when you edit your page using HTML without having to constantly paste your changes into WordPress to preview them, you might try this:

In a web browser, View the Source Code for the page or post you are working on. Select All. Copy and Paste the code into the Code/HTML window of Dreamweaver. Now save that page somewhere, and you should be able to open it in a browser – or maybe view it in Dreamweaver’s visual window – that is, you should be able to view it from your desktop, so that you don’t have to keep saving changes into the WordPress editor to see how they look.

You’ll need to identify the section of the HTML page that is the chuck of code you will paste into the WordPress HTML editing window when you get things looking the way you want. (Try demarcating it with <!– HTML comments –>.) This doesn’t always work, but if you want more control over your pages, this is the easiest way to do it.

WordPress Tutorial – Advanced “Back to Top” of Page Link

This Advanced-level WordPress Tutorial shows how to insert a “Back to Top” link in a WordPress Page or Post. The tutorial is advanced because it requires use of text editing software and FTP software to download and add HTML code to the header.php file in a WordPress theme. Once you add the HTML code to the header.php file, you can use the Code editing window in the WordPress Dashboard to insert a “Back to Top” link on any page or post. The advanced “Back to Top” link is superior to the “easy” “Back to Top” link covered in an earlier tutorial because it takes you to the top of the page much faster. A faster site provides a better user experience.

WordPress Tutorial – How to Make Changes to a WordPress Theme Sidebar Using a Text Editor

This Advanced-level WordPress tutorial shows you how to edit the sidebar.php file that is part of a WordPress theme. This is an Advanced tutorial because you will use a text editor to work with the actual PHP file — and FTP software to download and upload the file to a web hosting server — rather than making edits using the WordPress Dashboard.

This tutorial assumes you know how to use a text editor on a Macintosh or on a Windows PC, and it assumes you have and know how to use FTP software to transfer files from a web server to your computer and back up to the server when finished editing. The standard text editing software on a Mac is TextEdit. McBuzz also recommends text editing software called BBEdit, because it highlights the different parts of a PHP or HTML file in different colors, making it much easier to read and edit the file. On a PC, standard text editing software is Notepad and WordPad, which come installed with Windows.