Category: WordPress 101

There are so many benefits to choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without web programming skills and knowledge.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

This post explains what WordPress widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your web site.

What Are WordPress Widgets? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or menu item to your WP 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 program PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.

With WordPress widgets, you don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your website.

(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to touch code)

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

In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and delete features in certain parts of your website without having to touch any underlying 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:

• nested list of your web pages
• blog categories
• archives
• menus
• links to external sites
• most popular posts
• post comments
• advertisements
• quotations
• poll questions & results
• RSS content excerpts
• subscriber form
• video
• social media buttons
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further improve your website’s usability.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.

Normally, widget-powered functions can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, in the footer area, sometimes even below or above your content.

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

For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …

(Some WP themes provide only a single widgetized section)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that the theme only contains one widget area …

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

In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widgetized areas …

(Many themes offer users multiple widget areas)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …

(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

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

Where Can I See My Widgets?

The Widgets area is located within the WP admin area and can be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …

(Widgets Section)

The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.

On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)

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

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and available.

The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.

By default, your site already comes with a number of 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …

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

Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your site …

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

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

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

(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)

Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your website’s widgetized areas.

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

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

(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)

Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget area …

If we change the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …

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

The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

This immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple, huh?

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

Widget Management – Widget Previews

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

You can do many things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)

The ability to manage widgets from within your WP dashboard 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …

(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the sidebar menu 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.

Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience.

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

Absolutely!

With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.

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

(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)

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

(Most widgets offer configuration options!)

Using WordPress Widgets

As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website 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 great tutorials showing you how to use different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many useful tips on how to get the most out of WordPress with 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 related posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Newbies – What Are WordPress Plugins
• WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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