Category: WordPress 101

There are lots of benefits to choosing WordPress for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web coding skills.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to help you grow your website or blog.

What Are Widgets? An Introduction To Widgets For Newbies

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website or blog.

WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to program code.

Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.

WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.

(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)

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

In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:

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

Here are just some of the additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:

• list of your web pages
• blog post categories
• post archives
• custom page menus
• links to resources
• links to recent posts
• recent comments
• text ads
• user testimonials
• poll results
• RSS feed items
• subscriber form
• product catalog images
• twitter feeds
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your site.

As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s features.

Widgetized Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can display.

Typically, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header section, in the footer area, sometimes even below your content.

It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.

For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …

(Some themes only provide one widget enabled section)

Here is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widgetized area …

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

In contrast, the theme shown below contains various widget areas …

(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

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

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

The Widgets section is located inside your WordPress dashboard and can be accessed from the administration menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up the Widgets screen in your web browser …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets area displays all the widgets you can use on your site.

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

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)

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

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

The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …

(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …

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

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)

Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.

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

1. An opt-in form,
2. A click for support button, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)

If you took a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget bar …

If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

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

The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

This immediately changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(Widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty good stuff, huh?

Let’s go over some other useful things worth knowing about using widgets:

Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer

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

You can do a number of things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done in real time. If you like what you have 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!)

Widget management is a valuable 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the layout in the site’s sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience.

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

Absolutely!

With most static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls, RSS feed items, product images, social media sharing buttons, and more.

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

(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)

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

(Most widgets give you customizing options!)

Using Widgets

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

For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:

• WordPress For Website Owners – What Are WP Plugins
• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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