Category: WordPress Training Manual

There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without web programming skills and knowledge.

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

(WordPress widgets)

This article explains how WP widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to grow your site.

What Do WordPress Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For New Users

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website or blog.

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

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

Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code.

(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)

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

In simple terms, widgets allow you to:

• Easily insert, edit and delete content sections in certain areas of your website without touching any underlying code, and
• Rearrange 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:

• site pages
• blog post categories
• archived posts
• custom page menus
• links to resources
• posts that you want to promote
• post comments
• clickable text ads
• client testimonials
• poll questions & results
• RSS feed content
• opt-in subscription form
• images
• twitter feeds
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will soon discover, WP themes affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website or blog’s performance.

Widgetized Areas

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

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

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

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

(Some themes have only a single widget area)

Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …

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

In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widgetized areas …

(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …

(Widgets Section)

The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.

On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.

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

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

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

Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your website or blog …

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

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all from your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …

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

With drag and drop you can easily reorder the 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 show the following:

1. A newsletter subscription form,
2. A contact support button, and
3. A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features appear 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 were arranged in the active widget section …

If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)

The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of 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?

There are some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:

Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer

Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, 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 have done before committing any changes to your live website.

You can do many modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 to your site visitors.

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

The ability to manage widgets from 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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the order of elements in the site’s 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.

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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey results, RSS content, videos, social media buttons, 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 configurable options)

Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets provide users with configuration options!)

Using WordPress Widgets

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

For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool tips for getting 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WP For Non-Technical Business Owners – What Is A WordPress Plugin
• WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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