Create a News Story with a Link to a Flyer

Let’s suppose that you have an event coming up during the holiday season. Maybe your club will be having a big party or a service project and there’s a nice flyer to advertise it. Or, maybe you’ve created a nice press release and want to include that on your site. The problem is, how do you let people who visit your home page or your calendar to know about the document? For specific steps on how to do this, read the rest of this post.

The Document

In order to have a link to a document, you must first have uploaded a document. This might be a PDF or a Word document. It could be a zip file or even a remote photo gallery. The process is the same for all of these options. You must first have something to link to, then you can create the link.

We’ll assume for the rest of this example that you’ve created a flyer that is in a PDF format. (If you don’t know how to create a PDF, you probably need a PDF writer. You can find a free PDF writer from www.cutepdf.com). To upload the PDF, do the following:

1. Go to Site Administration
2. Go to News and Doc Admin
3. Click on the Upload News Doc button under Other Administration Links
4. Fill out the form, then click on the Upload button.
5. Click on the Browse button.
6. Navigate to the file to be uploaded and select the file. Once the file has been selected, you may need to click the Open button.
7. Click on the Use this File button.
8. You will receive a File Uploading message. This will disappear when the file upload has finished. If you receive a failure message, your upload did not succeed.
9. Once you see the message that the upload has succeeded, copy ALL of the address that begins “clubdocs/…”.
10. Continue filling out the form
11. Submit your work when you are done filling out the form.

Creating the Link

The next step will be to create the link in your news story. For this example, we’re going to assume that the link will be in your Home page text. You could just as easily place this link in a new news story or any other existing news story. To create the link in the news story, do the following:

1. In News and Doc Admin, click on the link for the current Home page text news story (normally, this is called “Home page text.”)
2. Scroll down to the text editor, then position your cursor exactly where you want to link to appear in the text.
3. Click the “Insert/Edit a Hyperlink” icon in the Wysiwyg text editor.
4. Type the text to use as the link, something like “click here” or the name of a form or “download our brochure” in the Link Text field at the top of the dialog box
5. Paste the link address that you copied from above into the “URL” field in the dialog box (bottom of the dialog box)
6. Click OK or, optionally, set the link to open in a new window (if that’s what you want)
7. Submit the changes to your news story.

That’s it! Go to the Home page (or to the news story where you inserted the link) and click the link to see that it works. (Always check your work to avoid nasty surprises later on!) If the link doesn’t work, you’ll need to confirm that the document uploaded properly and that the link to that document is correct. If the link is not EXACTLY the same, it will not work. Of course, if you have trouble, feel free to contact us for help.