Author: WP Compendium

There are many benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool to manage and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no web programming skills required.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this post you will learn how WP widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help you to supercharge your web site.

WP Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners

(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or menu item to your site.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to script code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie users.

With widgets, users don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to enhance their website.

(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)

Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.

Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and delete blocks of code in certain parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
• Rearrange how various elements display on ”widgetized” areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.

Here are just some of the many great things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:

• list of pages
• blog post categories
• archive
• customized menus
• links to resources
• links to your recent posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
• clickable images
• user testimonials
• polls
• content from RSS feeds
• subscriber form
• videos
• twitter feeds
• add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the entire design of your site.

As you will soon learn, themes affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further enhance your website’s usability.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can show up in.

Normally, you will find widget-driven features in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, footer, and even below or above the content area.

It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.

For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …

(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget enabled section)

Here is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …

As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.

In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-enabled areas …

(Many themes provide a number of widget sections)

Here is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)

How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?

The Widgets section is located inside your WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up your Widgets section in your browser window …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets area displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.

The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active on your site.

The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.

In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets (e.g. widgets for displaying your pages, links, posts, post categories, adding text, adding RSS feeds, adding tags, adding a search box, etc …) and active widgets.

These widgets are available in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …

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

Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …

(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)

WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)

Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order of your widget-enabled sections.

For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:

1. An opt-in form,
2. A contact support button, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)

Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …

Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …

(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …

This immediately changes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

Here are some more useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:

Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section

Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the live website.

You can do lots of modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you’ve done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site to visitors.

(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)

The ability to manage widgets from within your own WordPress dashboard is a great feature of WordPress. You can work in preview mode inside the WordPress Theme Customizer screen (Appearance > Customize) and see how your widget content will appear prior to publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …

(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the layout in the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience.

Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?

Absolutely!

With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or surveys, RSS content excerpts, product images, Facebook feeds, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)

Most widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets give you customizable options!)

Using WP Widgets

As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.

For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips on how to get the most out of WordPress using widgets:

• How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 1
• How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 2
• How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 3
• How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 4

Related Posts

If you are a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:

• WordPress Features Explained – What Are WP Plugins
• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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