If you tried to use this Tutorial and failed: Banners for Home-Start then I empathise with you.
I was working with a client this week who told me that she had tried to use it with no success. I tried it and did not succeed either. The problem was very subtle!
I had carefully formatted the text as Courier in the example. Assuming (rather foolishly) that this would be “safe and foolproof”. It was not.
In the examples I have given the quote symbol ” is incorrectly mapped to a different ASCII code, it is not the standard quote symbol used in writing code. It is a special version. This corrupts the code if you cut and paste from my example. When you paste it into a page in Text mode and save it, the code is removed! Why? Because the ” symbol is not recognised and therefore the code is invalid. Rather than accepting invalid code, WordPress strips everything out so as to avoid the website from crashing due to poor or buggy code. That is good if you know what is happening, but bad if you don’t!
Making it foolproof
I have gone back and amended the tutorial by adding a downloadable text file with the correct text in it. Simply download it, open it with NotePad and then copy and paste the relevant section it to make it work. Do not use MS Word or any word processor to do this. Just a plain old text editor. You can either go back to the original article or download the text file from here: boxes code
Just one tip, if you ever find something here which does not work, don’t assume it is something you did, it could be something I did! So drop me a line.