Actually, regarding the rather smug tone of my previous post, it turns out there were problems…
We had a message from someone who could not download our Booking Form PDF file. On investigation, I discovered that none of the download links were working! Something to do with access being denied to the files.
This particular problem had occurred before with NextGEN Gallery and Highslide—the image gallery and viewing plugins. After a day’s frustrating fine-tooth combing of the code I found that the solution was not in the code. The answer seemed to be to create the directory and upload files using the FTP Client (Filezilla in our case) rather than using the onboard WordPress/NextGEN Gallery functions. Then everything seemed to work as expected.
So, using Filezilla, I created a ‘downloads’ directory and uploaded the PDFs into it. To my relief, the problem was solved.
I am sure anyone with even a basic knowledge of web servers and access permissions could explain what I did there and why it worked. Please feel free to add a comment and enlighten me as my host’s FAQs do not use sufficiently simple language and are, in my opinion, lacking something (a layout that works in a browser other than Internet Explorer for starters!).