Category: WordPress Customization

There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills or knowledge required.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can grow your website or blog.

What Do Widgets Do? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)

A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or item to your site.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to write web code.

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

WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to edit code.

(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)

Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.

In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
• Reconfigure how various elements display 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:

• list of your web pages
• categories
• post archives
• custom menus
• links to external sites
• links to your recent posts
• comments
• text ads
• testimonials
• surveys
• RSS feed items
• registration box
• video thumbnails
• social media share buttons
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other blog posts, we provide detailed information about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and change the design of your website.

As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website’s performance.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can add widgets to.

Typically, widget-driven features can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, footer, and even below or above the content section.

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

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

(Some themes have only a single widgetized section)

Below is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …

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

In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains multiple widget-enabled areas …

(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)

Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …

(Multiple widgets 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)

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

The Widgets screen is found inside your WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed from the WP admin menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …

(Widgets Section)

The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.

The right-hand section of the window displays 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 screen.

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

In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …

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

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

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

Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)

Using drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your widgetized areas.

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

1. A subscription form,
2. A click for support button, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)

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

If we change these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …

(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …

As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in 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 banner (2) is now found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty good stuff, huh?

Here are a few other useful things worth knowing about using widgets:

Widget Management – Widget Previews

Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 lots of modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 inside your dashboard 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Rearrange 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, user testimonials or surveys, RSS content, videos, social media buttons, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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)

Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes 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 customizable options!)

How To Use WordPress Widgets

As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.

For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips for getting the most benefit out of WordPress using 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 Features Explained – What Is A WordPress Plugin
• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

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

***

***