There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building and managing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site without requiring programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete blocks of code to certain parts of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP theme 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- post comments
- advertising banners
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your site’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Usually, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes have only one widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized sections)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(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 section)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your WP dashboard and can easily be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily rearrange the order of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth knowing about using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your WordPress 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 it (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar 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 elements 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS content excerpts, videos, Twitter 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 configuration options)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure them. 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 information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web 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 different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
- WordPress For Non-Technical Beginners – What Are WP Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Hopefully, this information has given you 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 for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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