Category: WordPress Training Manual

There are many great things about choosing WordPress to build and manage your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no coding skills or knowledge required.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.

(Widgets)

This article explains how WP widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your web site.

About WordPress Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Business Owners

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website.

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 write code.

Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techies.

With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to customize their websites.

(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to edit code)

Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

Simply put, widgets allow you to:

• Easily add, edit and remove features to parts of your website 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 many great things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:

• pages on your site
• blog post categories
• blog post archive
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to resources
• links to your recent posts
• user comments
• image banners
• quotations
• survey results
• RSS feed content
• subscriber form
• image galleries
• twitter feeds
• add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your website.

As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your site’s usability.

Widget-Ready Themes

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can appear.

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

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

For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …

(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget area)

Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …

As you can see, the only place 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 in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-enabled areas …

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

Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …

(Multiple widgets areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three 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 Can I See My Widgets?

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

This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …

(Widgets Panel)

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

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 activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.

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

In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.

By default, 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …

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

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

(Installing 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, rearrange and remove them all from your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)

Drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your widget-enabled sections.

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 WP plugin …

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

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

If we change the order these widgets in the 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 reordered in the sidebar …

As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Here are a few more things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:

Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section

Depending upon the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.

You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments 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’ve 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!)

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 changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widgets in 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 layout with widgets to 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 web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or poll results, RSS feed items, product images, Twitter feeds, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)

Many widgets provide a number of 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets offer configurable options!)

How To Use WordPress Widgets

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

For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Website Owners – WordPress Plugins
• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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