Category: WordPress Customization

There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building and growing a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your site without web programming skills.

WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can grow your site.

What’s A WordPress Widget? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners

(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your site.

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

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

Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.

(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to edit 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 plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily add, edit and remove functionality to certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
• Reconfigure the functional layout of your theme 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• nested list of your web pages
• site categories
• post archives
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to external sites
• posts that you want to promote
• user comments
• clickable text ads
• customer testimonials
• poll questions & results
• content from RSS feeds
• subscription form
• image galleries
• social media sharing buttons
• add widgets from other 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 WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your site.

As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will extend your website’s usability.

Widgetized Areas

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

Normally, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header section, footer, sometimes even below your content section.

It all depends on what theme that you have installed.

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

(Some themes have only one widget-ready section)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see that this specific WordPress theme only includes one widget area …

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

In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget areas …

(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget sections)

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

(Multiple widgets areas)

As you can see, with 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

To access the Widgets area log into your WordPress administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.

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-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately activated for use on your site.

Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.

By default, 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …

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

Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …

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

Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)

Use drag & drop to easily reconfigure the order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.

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

1. A subscription form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)

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

Let’s now change these 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 changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

Let me just show you some more things about using 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’re also able to 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 the live website.

You can do several modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 to your site visitors.

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

Widget management 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar menu 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.

Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve visitor 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add other features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, 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 configurable options)

Many widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site 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 customization!)

How To Use Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding 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 improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many great 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Newbies – What Are WP Plugins
• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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