Author: WP Compendium

In Part 1 of this step-by-step tutorial series, we cover the basics of using WordPress widgets.

In this section you are going to begin configuring several sidebar widgets in WordPress.

Configuring Commonly-Used WordPress Widgets

By default, your site comes with several pre-installed active widgets, such as widgets that let you display external links, filter posts by categories, RSS feed content, adding a search box, etc.

(By default, your site comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)

Setting Up Widgets On Your Blog Sidebar Section: Step-By-Step Tutorial

In this tutorial, we are going to add, configure and reorder s number of WordPress widgets, including:

• Add a clickable Support image linking to the contact page.
• Add a Categories section with a drop down menu.
• Add a Recent Posts section to display your latest posts.
• Adding a list of Pages.
• Display Links on your sidebar section.
• Displaying news items using an RSS Feed section.
• Adding a list of clickable tags using a Tag Cloud section.
• Add and configure an Archives section to the sidebar.

The Widgets section is located inside the WP administration area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …

(Widgets Menu)

This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser window …

(Widgets Screen)

Let’s start by configuring text widgets …

Adding Text Widgets

Text widgets are quite useful …

(Text widget)

Rich Text Widget

From version 4.8 onward, WordPress has added native rich-text editing capabilities to text widgets …

(Rich Text Widget)

This lets you quickly and easily format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text …

(Format text easily with the new text widget)

A text widget lets you insert just about anything you want into the sidebar area or other widget sections, such as events, image links, reviews and more to your site … simply by typing in text or pasting HTML into the widget content area. You can also add an optional title in the Title field. Remember to save your settings when done …

(A text widget is really useful!)

Example: Using A Text Widget To Add A Help Button To Your Sidebar Navigation Area

For this example, we’ll set up a clickable help button on your sidebar area that will take visitors to a page on your site (or an external site, e.g. a helpdesk) where they can contact you for help and support.

First, you will need to create or source a “help button” graphic image that visitors can click on …

We’ll set up a clickable Help button to display at the top of the sidebar navigation section like in the example shown below …

Step 1 – Upload your image.

To display the clickable button image on your site, the image must be uploaded to your server. Upload your button graphic to a folder on your server and note the address of your image location.

E.g. …

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg

This information will be required in Step 3.

For visitors to go to the contact page when they click on the support button, you will need to either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will then link your button graphic to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Create your support page.

Create a contact page and note down its URL …

Step 3 – Create your text widget code.

If you’re not a technical-minded person, don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. Basically, you just need to create the instructions linking your button image to your destination URL.

Your code can be written a plain text editor and will look something like this …

• Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code with the URL of your contact page location.
• Replace “http://yourimagelocation.com/img/supportbutton.jpg” in the code above with the URL of your image location.

The screenshot below shows which sections of the above code you need to replace with your actual contact details …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of your text file content to your clipboard when finished.

If you need help with basic HTML code, refer to this tutorial:

• HTML Basics For New WordPress Users

Next, go back to your Widgets screen …

(Widgets Area)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you want the support button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, select a Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

Drag the Text widget to the Active Widgets section and release it at the top of the Widget Area …

(Drag and drop your WordPress text widget)

Step 5 – Configure the text widget.

Click on the widget title bar to configure the widget settings. Paste the code with the links to your contact page and graphic button into the text widget content area and click save …

Add a title section to your widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination URLs into the Content box, then click the save button …

Note: Make sure to check all URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or your clickable button will not work.

*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***

If you’re adding text with no formatting tags, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in paragraphs (note: this is not necessary if you paste in HTML code like we’re using in the example for this tutorial).

Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs option not checked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option unchecked)

Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs box ticked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option checked)

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Step 6 – Refresh your web browser.

Once you have added your widget and code content, go to your site and refresh your web browser. If all links have been entered correctly, then your clickable support button should display in the sidebar menu …

(Clickable support button widget on blog sidebar)

The screenshot above shows a clickable button added to a newly-installed WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test your button.

The final step is to make sure that your destination link works. Test the button to make sure that your visitors will go to the help page when clicking the graphic image. If you are taken to your support page, then the text widget has been set up correctly …

(Test the text widget)

Useful Tips:

If you want the contact page to open in a new browser window when visitors click on the help (so they don’t leave the page they’re on), then change the text widget code from this:

To this (i.e. insert the section that says: target=”_blank” in your code):

When choosing images for your sidebar menu, make sure that the width of your image doesn’t exceed the width of the sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. Note that some themes can display different column widths depending on their templates and layout. Some sidebars are wide and some are narrow. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of the button image, then you may have to either adjust the size of your images, or the column width to make the images display correctly on your theme.

(Adjust column width or reduce image size)

Extra Tips:

• If you don’t want the button to be centered inside your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the HTML code. The image will then be left-aligned.
• Link your support button to any URL you like (e.g. to an external link, contact form, support forum, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the links in your widget.

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This is the end of section two of this series of tutorials.

Click here to continue reading:

• How To Add And Configure WordPress Widgets In The Site – Part Three

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