Get 1.5 hours of WordPress® Training for $99 during October and November!

Over the phone, in-person, at the coffee shop.

You prepare a list of questions or order the Intro to WordPress session.

This offer is for bloggers who have WordPress blogs and want to learn more about updating their blogs.
Existing customers are welcome.

Must purchase and schedule by OCTOBER 31st. Training can be scheduled for October or November. Coupon can be used for up to three (1.5 hr.) sessions. All sessions prepaid at time of purchase/scheduling.

Blocked dates…Training not available October 17th – 21st nor November 23rd – 25th.

To reserve your date(s) for WordPress Training, contact Karen at 508-480-8833 or
use the Make Payment button (in the header) to purchase your sessions

1 ($99)   ~~~~~~  2 ($198)  ~~~~~~  3 ($297)
In the Invoices Paying field – Enter “WordPress Training”.

Karen will contact you to schedule your session(s) upon receiving notification of your payment.

My current favorite WordPress® plugin is Dynamic Widgets by Qurl. I had been wishing for a long time that such a plugin existed, but, having over 25 years programming experience, I understood the programming effort it would take, and never thought that anyone would invest the time.

Thanks to Qurl, we don’t have to wait any longer… and by the looks of the stats on theWordPress download page (as of 6/27/11),  I’m only one of tens of thousands who like this plugin! It has been downloaded over 47 thousand times already…

Best thing for me = My clients can add content (or images) to the sidebar and designate on which pages the content (or image) should appear, AND the client does not have to be a super-user.

The WordPress plugin lets you decide on a page-per-page basis whether you want a widget to appear in the sidebar or not.  You can select each page, or each section, or each type of page, or each category, and so on and so on. You can include entire groups of pages and exclude entire groups of pages.

Dynamic Widgets is powerful because it is so flexible AND easy to use. Here’s the description at the WordPress download page:

Dynamic Widgets gives you full control on which pages your widgets will appear. It lets you dynamic[al]ly place the widgets on WordPress pages by setting conditional rules with just a few mouse clicks by role, dates, browser, language (WPML), for the homepage, single posts, attachments, pages, authors, categories, archives, error page, search page, custom post types, custom post type archives, WPEC/WPSC categories, BuddyPress Components and BuddyPress Groups

Practical Application of Dynamic Widgets
So, say you want to display quotes in the sidebar and you want a different quote on each page. Up until now, you would have had to hire a professional web person to “fix it” so that you could add those quotes. Now, all you need to do is install Dynamic Widgets (or have your web professional install (and activate) it for you), then create a Text Widget for each quote.

Once the text widget is created, click on the word “static” at the bottom of the text widget next to “Dynamic Widgets”, and the Dynamic Widgets dialogue box will open up so that you can designate the pages to include the widget and the pages on which to exclude the widget.

Download Dynamic Widgets now!

(FYI – I am not affiliated in any way with the author of Dynamic Widgets nor WordPress – Just a long-time user of WordPress who is very enthusiastic about my latest best WordPress plugin!)

When you are writing in your WordPress® blog, sometimes you want to link to a section in the same post or on the same page. A good example of this is when you create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page. So let’s use that as our example.

Step 1 - Write the Questions [the content that you want to LINK]

1. How do you create a link to a section in the same post or page in your blog?
2. How do you create a link to a page within your own blog?
3. How do you create a link to a page in someone else’s blog?

Step 2 – Write the answers [the sections that you want to LINK TO]
I start the answer section by listing my questions in order and then adding the answers in between each question. I bold the question so that it is quicker to find (in case someone is scrolling instead of being taken there because they clicked on a link)

1. How do you create a link to a section in the same post or page in your blog?
Here’s the instructions for creating a link to a section on the same page or in the same post. And these instructions go on for a paragraph or two and so on and so on.

Step 3 – Now link Question 1 in Step 1 to the Answer in Step 2.

1. 

   Chain Link Icon

   Select (highlight) Question 1 in Step 1 (How do you create a link to a section in the same post or page in your blog?) AND click on the Chain LINK icon while the question is highlighted.



2. The LINK dialogue box displays on top of the screen.
3. In the Link URL, paste the address to the Page or Post, then type a slash (/), then enter pound sign (#) and a link name. No spaces in the link. No numbers. No underscores. Only small letters and dashes (hyphens). Here, I added /#link-same-page to the full page address which is (http://www.adventuresonline.com/1331/wordpress-how-to-create-a-link-to-a-section-in-your-post)
4. Choose “Open link in the SAME window”
5. Give the link a keyword-rich title.
6. Set the class (or not – depends on the style you’ve set up)
7. Click INSERT.
8. Your questions should now look like this:
   1. How do you create a link to a section in the same post or page in your blog?
   2. How do you create a link to a page within your own blog?
   3. How do you create a link to a page in someone else’s blog?

Your link will not work because there is no section labeled “link-same-page”. We’ll do that next.

SAVE YOUR POST or PAGE as a DRAFT

Step 4 – Add an “anchor” to the section that you want to link to

1. 

   Visual Mode HTML Mode

   Open the post or page

2. Click the HTML mode Tab
3. Scroll down to the ANSWER section
4. Place the cursor to the LEFT of the Answer – in this case, to the left of the number “1″ in 1. How do you create a link to …..
5. Type in:
   
6. PUBLISH or Update the post or page
7. Preview* or View the post or page
8. Click the link on Question 1. If it does not go to Answer for Question 1, rinse and repeat… try these steps again.*
   

NOTE: In Preview, the link might not work because WordPress adds code at the end of the page name in the browser’s address bar. In that case, click in the address bar, and delete the extra info until you see just the blog address and the page name.  At the end of the page name add a slash (/), then a pound sign (#), then the name of your link “link-same-page”, then click the carriage return.

NOTE2: Also note, that this post links ABOVE where the link is and not below. As long as you add your anchor ( link-same-text) and use the correct formatting, you can link above or below your link.

WordPress automatically lists all of the Pages we create in the Pages list. Sometimes we create Pages that we don’t want to be listed with the other Pages.  Maybe it is a private Page that you want to let a select few know about; maybe it is a Page that you will link to from within another Page and you don’t want it listed on its own…

How do you remove a Page from the Pages list?

1. Log into the WordPress Dashboard.
2. On the menus on the left, look for Appearance. Click the arrow so that the Appearance drop-down menu displays.
3. Click Widgets.
4. When the Widgets page displays, look over to the right in the Sidebar section for the Pages tab.
5. Click on the tab and the Pages dialogue box will display.
6. Look for a box near Exclude: Enter the NUMBER of the Page to exclude.
7. Save/Update and look at the website to ensure that the Page is no longer listed.

How do you know the number of a Page?

1. Click the Pages tab on the left menus when you are in the Dashboard.
2. When the list of pages displays, look for the page that you want to exclude.
3. When you see the Page that you want to exclude, run the cursor over it so Edit displays.

   

   Roll the cursor over Edit and look at the status bar on the bottom of the browser (where the address displays when you are going to link to another page). Write the number down that represents the Page.

4. Ignore the fact the the word before the number is “post”. Also, some of you may have the date, month, or year listed as well, so, be sure to NOT take those numbers…just the page number.

When WordPress is installed in your hosting account, the (default) settings are to display your blog posts on the Home Page. Oftentimes, people want the Home Page to be static so that it displays a Welcome message, and then the rest of the website can act like a blog.

To make a static Home Page in WordPress is very simple.

First, create a Page (not a Post – See WordPress Blog: Posts vs Pages.) Save the Page under any name, say…Welcome.  Edit the Page and add your welcome message and graphics. Save/Publish the Page.

Click on the Settings tab on the left towards the bottom of all the Dashboard menus. When the drop-down menu displays, click Reading. Here’s what it looks like before changes are made.

WordPress Default Reading Settings

Front Page displays ->  “Your latest posts” option is selected.

Click the next option ->  A static page (select below).

Pull down the Front Page selection list and select the Name of the Page you just created.

Click Save Changes at the bottom and View your website. Voila! You have a new static Home Page.

That is all there is to creating a static home page for your WordPress blog!

You’ve accomplished your goal…Now let’s do a little clean up …

You just told WordPress to NOT display your blog posts on the Home page, but, instead, to display your static Welcome message… You didn’t tell WordPress where to display your blog posts now that you have removed them from their default location…So let’s take care of that.

Create another Page.

You can give the Page any name like…Blog Posts. I recommend giving it a meaningful name; something that has to do with your keyword list… I used Web News and Blogs which was appropriate when my blog was created. If you are trying to brand your name, then YourFirstName YourLastName Blog would be good.

Save/Publish the page. You can write a note in the page that reminds you (six months to a year down the road) “Do not delete. This is my blog page.” Whatever you write will not display.

Go back to Settings and click on Reading.

Pull down the Posts Page selection list (below the Front Page selection list you used above) and select the Name of the Page you just created.

Click Save Changes at the bottom and View your website. You now have a static Home Page and a Blog page.

Here’s what the WordPress Reading Settings look like now:

Defining WordPress Static Home Page

Depending on the Theme you used for your WordPress blog, the Welcome and Blog Posts pages you just created may now appear in a list of Pages for your website. Later this week, we’ll learn how to make those NOT display in that list.