Category: WordPress Configuration

In Part One of this tutorial, we explained the basics of how to use WordPress widgets.

In this section you are going to begin configuring a number of WordPress widgets.

Configuring Widgets

By default, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets, such as widgets that let you display links to your site’s pages, recent posts, news items, adding search features, etc.

(In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of preinstalled widgets)

How To Configure Widgets On Your Sidebar Navigation Area: Tutorial

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

• Adding a Support image linking to the support page.
• Adding a Categories section.
• Add a Recent Posts section.
• Adding a list of your site’s most important Pages.
• Display Links on your sidebar navigation section.
• Adding an RSS Feed section.
• Add a Tag Cloud.
• Adding and configuring an Archives section to your sidebar area.

To use widgets, access the Widgets section located inside your admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …

(Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser …

(Widgets Screen)

Let’s begin to configure your sidebar menu 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 can be used to add events, maps and directions, special promotions and more to your site … just by typing in text or inserting HTML into the content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings …

(Text widgets are extremely versatile!)

Example: Add A Contact Button To The Sidebar Section Using A Text Widget

For this example, let’s set up a contact button on your sidebar that takes your 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, create or source a “help button” graphic image that you will want your visitors to click on …

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

Step 1 – Upload your image.

To display the clickable image on your site, you must first upload the image to a folder on your server and note the URL pointing to your server’s image location.

For example …

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

You will use this information in Step 3.

For visitors to go to the contact page when the support button gets clicked, 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 image to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Add the destination page.

Create a contact page and note its URL …

Step 3 – Create the HTML code for your text widget.

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 for your clickable button.

Your instructions can be written a plain text editor and should look something like this …

• Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code above 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 the actual contact page and image URLs …

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

If you need help understanding basic HTML code, see this tutorial:

• Formatting Content Using HTML Basics For Non-Technical WordPress Users

Go back to your Widgets section …

(Widgets Screen)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you would like your button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, select the Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

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

(Dragging and dropping your Text widget)

Step 5 – Configure your widget.

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

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

Note: Remember to check all links before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or your button will not work.

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

If you’re adding text with no formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in an HTML paragraph code (note: not required if you’re typing in HTML content 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 selected …

(Automatically add paragraphs option not checked)

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

(Automatically add paragraphs box selected)

***

Step 6 – Refresh the browser.

Once you have added your widget and code, visit your site and refresh the browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then your support button will display in the site’s sidebar menu …

(Clickable button widget on blog sidebar)

The above screenshot shows the button added to a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test your widget.

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

(Test your text widget to ensure you’ve set up everything correctly)

Tips:

If you would like a new window to open up when visitors click on your support button (so they don’t leave the page they’re on), then change the text widget code from this:

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

When inserting images into your sidebar navigation area, make sure that the width of the image does not exceed the width of the sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. Note that some themes may display elements differently depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars may be wider or narrower. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of the button images, then you may have to either adjust the graphic size, or the width of your sidebar column to make elements display correctly on your sidebar section.

(Adjust column width or reduce image size)

Extra Tips:

• If you don’t want the image to be centered inside your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the code. The image will then be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
• Link your help button to any URL you like (e.g. to an external link, helpdesk, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the content in your widget.

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This is the end of section 2 of this tutorial.

To view Part 3, click here:

• How To Add Widgets To WordPress – Part 3

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