Tag Archives: tutorial

WordPress Tutorial – Use a Text Widget to Customize Sidebar

LATEST TUTORIALS: mcbuzz.wordpress.com CODE FOR THIS TUTORIAL HERE mcbuzz.wordpress.com This Intermediate level WordPress tutorial shows how to use a text widget to customize a WordPress sidebar. To see the final product of the tutorial in the Business Blogging 101 website and the HTML code used in this example, go to mcbuzz.wordpress.com and search for “text widget”. Widgets are a very useful feature of most new WordPress themes. These are called “widget enabled” or “widgetized” themes or “widget enabled” or “widgetized” sidebars. They allow you to add custom content to your sidebars with little or no knowledge of HTML or other code. In an earlier tutorial, I showed how to add Flickr photos to a WordPress sidebar using the Flickr photo widget. The example I use in this tutorial shows how to create a custom text box with a short biographical note and part of that text is a link. In PART TWO of this tutorial, I show how to insert an image into the same custom sidebar box, along with a LinkedIn profile “badge”. You can use these techniques to put whatever you want into your own WordPress sidebar.

WordPress Tutorial – Edit a Sidebar File Using a Text Editor

This Advanced-level WordPress tutorial shows how to download, edit and upload a WordPress theme sidebar file (sidebar.php) using FTP software and a text editor. This is considered an advanced WordPress tutorial because you work with the files for the WordPress theme. You do not use the WordPress Dashboard in this tutorial. The tutorial assumes you know how to setup and use FTP software on your computer so that you can download and upload the sidebar file. It also assumes you know how to open a text file like sidebar.php using a text editor. On a PC, common text editors are Notepad and Wordpad. On a Mac, the default text editor is TextEdit. A good Macintosh text editor for HTML and PHP files is BBEdit.

WordPress Tutorial – Make a Static Page Your Home/Front Page

NOTE: Updated tutorial at bit.ly for WordPress version 2.7. This Beginner-level WordPress Tutorial by Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications shows you how to make a static WordPress Page your home page (also called “front” page). The default WordPress home page in most themes shows the chronological blog post entries with the most recent post at the top. You can create a static page using the Dashboard – Write – Page, and then tell WordPress to use that page as your home page (using Options – Reading – Front Page). This WordPress tutorial also shows you how to change the order of page navigation tabs or links.

Own Your Blog or Else! Easy WordPress Install

Watch this video tutorial and see how simple it is to get online with a blog today! Create a blog using free software from wordpress.org and get tips on why, if you want to become a serious blogger, if you want to make money with your blog or, if you want to control your blog, then using free blogs such as blogger.com or wordpress.com is NOT an option … You must own your blog. Here’s why …if you use hosted solutions such as blogger.com or wordpress.com, they can delete your site without your permission and there is nothing you can do about it. Also, using hosted sites to host your blog means that you have limited opportunities of monetizing your blog because some of them don’t allow you to make the most of advertising with say Google AdSense. WordPress.com for example makes it very clear that it is against their terms of service to commercialize your WordPress.com hosted blog by hosting paid advertising and will result in your blog being deleted. In fact, I’ve just been reading one forum where there is a reader called “Rainmaker” and he seems to have made it his job to report people who are commercializing their WordPress blogs and within no time, their sites have been deleted by WordPress. So don’t say you haven’t been warned. What you need to do is go to WordPress.org and download their free software and then upload the software to the server where you have your own hosting account, using your own domain name. Alternatively, you can use the automated feature found