Category: WordPress Customization

There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building, managing and growing your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without requiring web programming skills and knowledge.

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

(Widgets)

In this blog post you will learn what WP widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help add new functionality to your web site.

How Do WordPress Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Users

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, 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 that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to script code.

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techie users.

With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize your site.

(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)

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

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

• Easily add, edit and remove blocks of code to areas of your site without touching any web code, and
• Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:

• index of pages
• content categories
• archived content posts
• menus that display only selected pages
• links to external sites
• links to recent posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to posts
• text ads
• testimonials
• survey results
• RSS content excerpts
• subscriber form
• product images
• social media sharing buttons
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide additional content about WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your site.

As you will soon learn, themes can affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further extend your website’s functionality.

Widgetized Themes

Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can show up in.

Typically, you will find widgets at work in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, the footer section, even below or above the content.

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

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

(Some themes only provide one widgetized area)

Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that the theme only contains one widget-enabled area …

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

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

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

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

(Multiple widgets areas)

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

How Can I See My WP Widgets?

The Widgets section is located within the WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …

(Widgets Panel)

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

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

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)

Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.

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

Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets retain their 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, Categories, etc. to your visitors …

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

Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …

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

WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

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

(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)

Using drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widgetized sections.

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

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

(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)

Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget area …

Let’s now reorganize these 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 your sidebar …

This immediately reorganizes the layout of your 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(Widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool, huh?

Let me just show you some other useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:

Widget Management – Preview Widgets

Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage your 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 a number of things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your active 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 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s user experience)

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

Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived blog post entries section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, video galleries, Twitter feeds, 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 provide users with little to no customizable options)

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

(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)

How To Use WP Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site 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 various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WordPress Explained – What Is A WordPress Plugin
• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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