Using WordPress Tutorial Series

One of the many reasons to use WordPress for your website is because it makes it easy to update your site and publish fresh new content.

This page contains articles from my Using WordPress tutorial series. This series covers topics for beginners showing visual examples of how to use WordPress to manage and update the content on your website.

What Is A WordPress Theme?

October 4, 2009

If you’re new to WordPress, one of your first questions might be to ask, “What exactly is a theme, and do I need to use one?” The short answer is that a theme is the background, or “skin,” of your website. And yes, you will most definitely want to use a theme to make your [...]

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Pages widget – adding or excluding a directory of your static content

September 26, 2009
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Pages are the key to displaying static content on your WordPress website or blog. Many themes allow you to display your pages as menus across the top of the page.  You can also create a quick-reference list of the static pages on your blog using the pages widget. You can even choose to leave some [...]

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Creating a PollDaddy Poll on Your WordPress Website or Blog

September 24, 2009
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If you want to quiz or poll your readers with a customizable, embeddable poll, the PollDaddy feature baked into the WordPress editor makes it really easy. (Requires the PollDaddy Plugin.) This short video talks you through the process of putting a poll together and checking up on the results.

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Adding a new link to your WordPress-sidebar

July 26, 2009
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Links are the way you can tell your visitors about other sites you recommend.  These can be your sites – your photos page on Flickr, another blog or website you maintain, your page on LinkedIn or any link.  Since you can promote any link, these can also be links to other sites that you would [...]

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How To Change the Order of Your Nav Bar Items in WordPress

July 24, 2009
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By default, WordPress tries to order the Pages in your Navigation bar alphabetically by title. But what if you want to re-order them? Well, don’t worry, it is possible. It’s a bit quirky, but you have total control over which order your navigation items appear in most WP Themes. The key is setting the Order [...]

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How To Add Navigation Sub-Menus in WordPress and the SmallBiz Theme

July 22, 2009
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If you are using the Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme v1.2 or higher you can add sub menus underneath any of your navigation menu items. This video shows you how: Steps for adding sub-menu items: Create a new WordPress Page (not a Post!) If you don’t know the difference, read this article: WordPress Pages vs Posts – [...]

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Adding & managing WordPress categories after the fact

July 21, 2009
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Categories are the key to organizing your WordPress blog.  Even long after a post has been published you can edit the categories. You can edit them one at a time or in bulk.  Check out the easy steps in the video and written out below.

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The RSS widget – pulling any blog feed into your sidebar

July 18, 2009
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The RSS widget lets you display (and customize) the latest updates to any RSS feed in the sidebar of your WordPress blog or website. What is RSS? RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to subscribe to the updates of another blog or website. Typically, you would use an RSS reader like Google Reader (that’s [...]

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Spring Cleaning – Adding and deleting categories in WordPress

July 15, 2009
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Categories are the key to organizing your WordPress blog. It’s not something that you need to do everyday – but every now and then a spring cleaning is a good idea. Some reasons why you might need some category cleanup include: You only have 1 or 2 posts in a category.  You planned on writing [...]

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How to Upload a PDF File to Your WordPress Blog

July 14, 2009
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Have you ever wanted to make a PDF file available for download on your WordPress blog or website? For example, maybe you want to make your patient pre-visit form available on your website so new patients can print it off at him and fill it in before coming to the office. This video shows you [...]

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