Free Easy WordPress Tutorials: Vote For a WordPress Tutorial Topic

Free WordPress Tutorials: Business Blogging 101 is getting more visitors than ever. WordPress 3.0 is out and flourishing (because it ROCKS). The new default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten, is more WordPressy AWESOMENESS. There has even been a recent resolution to an ongoing disagreement about the General Public License and Thesis WordPress theme.

With all this going on, I feel a need to create some more easy WordPress Tutorials that will add to the growing list and help more people discover and learn to use WordPress.

Use the Poll above to vote or nominate your own WordPress tutorial topic. I haven’t tried this kind of WordPress/Polldaddy poll  before, but I’ll add your suggestions if several people list the same one or something similar.

Feel free to include your own ideas for WordPress tutorials in more detail using the comment form.

UPDATE: Votes for the next easy WordPress Tutorial topic are already coming in. Thanks, everyone!
I need more votes, so tell a friend!

I’m using a PollDaddy poll, which is really easy to do on WordPress.com. There’s also a PollDaddy plugin you can use to create polls and surveys on a self-hosted WordPress site. My poll has an option for “Other” so you can write in your own topic if none of my suggestions sounds good. Here’s how the poll results look when you view them in the WordPress Dashboard. Pretty darn cool!

Dashboard view of WordPress PollDaddy Poll on McBuzz.WordPress.com

WordPress Tutorial – How to Upload & Link to a PDF, Microsoft Word doc, or other doc in WordPress 2.7

This beginner-level WordPress tutorial is an update of the existing tutorial on Business Blogging 101 and YouTube called “WordPress Tutorial – How to Upload and Link to a PDF, Microsoft Word Document, Excel, PowerPoint or Other Doc Using WordPress“. That tutorial was done using an earlier version of WordPress. This tutorial uses WordPress 2.7.

This tutorial shows three things:

1) How to upload a PDF, Microsoft Word doc, PowerPoint or other Office-type document using WordPress 2.7

2) How to insert a link to that document into a WordPress post or page. (Visitors to your site can click on the link to download or view the document.), and

3) that there are two things called “Media Library” in the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard, one of which has more information about the files in the Library than the other does. It’s helpful to see how you get to each of these Media Libraries because you can find the URL link for a file in only one of them, which can be confusing!

UPDATE: WordPress 2.8 fixed the problem of the file URL. Before 2.8, the file URL was only visible in the Media Library that you access via the page/post editing interface. But with 2.8, you can find uploaded file URLs in either one of the Media Libraries. Thanks, WordPress crew!

How to Upload & Link to a PDF, Microsoft Word doc, or other doc in WordPress 2.7

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In the comments for this post, a reader asks about how to paste text from Microsoft Word into WordPress. (See discussion below for more.) As part of the answer to that question, here is a screen shot of the WordPress HTML editing tab and window.

 

WordPress Tutorial – How to Make a Static Page Your Home Page & Hide a Double Home Page Link

UPDATE – PLEASE NOTE:
The latest version of WordPress, WordPress 3.0, includes custom navigation menus. They are built into the new default theme, Twenty Eleven. Many themes on WordPress.com support custom menus. If your site is hosted on WordPress.com or you are using a theme that supports the new custom navigation menus, hiding a double Home page link is easy. See the tutorial on WordPress 101 called Building Custom Menus.*

IF YOU HAVE A SELF-HOSTED WORDPRESS SITE WITH AN OLDER THEME:
If you have a “self-hosted” site instead of one hosted on WordPress.com, you may be able to use the Exclude Pages Plugin for WordPress to hide your extra Home page link and any links that appear in your sidebar Pages navigation.

You can’t install plugins on sites hosted by WordPress.com. That’s one of the main drawbacks to hosting with WordPress.com. For those sites, this YouTube video tutorial (below) is still useful.

If you like this tutorial, you may also like: WordPress Tutorial – How to Make a “Child” Page (Subpage) and How to Hide a Link in the Pages Sidebar Widget

This beginner-level WordPress Tutorial shows how to make a “static” WordPress page your Home page (also called a “front page”), and how to hide the second Home page link that sometimes appears in your site navigation when you make that static page into a Home page.

By default, a WordPress website displays the blog page on the home / front page. For example, on the Business Blogging 101 website home page at https://mcbuzz.wordpress.com you see blog posts with the most recent post at the top of the page and earlier posts below that.

WordPress allows you to select a different page as your home page, so that you can display more traditional content like information about yourself or your business. You can also create another page to use as your blog page, with a link to that page in your site navigation. Watch the video tutorial below to see how to do this.

One problem you may run into when you make a static page your home page is that the link to that page now appears in the main site navigation, so that you have two links to the same home page – usually the page called “Home” in the main site navigation. The second part of this tutorial shows how to remove one of those links from your site navigation so that visitors to your site are not confused by the duplicate link.

WordPress Tutorial – How to Make a Static Page Your Home Page & Hide Double Home Page Link

*Note the “Pay What You Wish” pricing on WordPress 101. Business Blogging 101 is not an affiliate of WordPress 101 WordPress tutorials, meaning that I don’t get a kickback for referring people there.

WordPress Tutorial – How to Upload and Link to a PDF, Microsoft Word Document, Excel, PowerPoint or Other Doc Using WordPress

For an updated version of this tutorial using WordPress 2.7, see “WordPress Tutorial – How to Upload & Link to a PDF, Microsoft Word doc, or other doc in WordPress 2.7“.

This WordPress tutorial by Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications shows how to upload and link to a PDF, Microsoft Word Document, Excel, PowerPoint or other document. When finished, you will have a link in your WordPress Post or Page that site visitors can click on to download the document.

NOTE: Need this tutorial for WordPress 2.7+? See “How to Upload & Link to a PDF…“.