Category: WordPress Training Manual

There are so many benefits to using WordPress to build and manage a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website without web programming skills and knowledge.

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

(Widgets)

This article explains how WP widgets work, why widgets are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your web site.

What Is A Widget? An Introduction To Widgets For Website Owners

(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your website.

WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program web code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are made for non-technical users.

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

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

Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:

• Easily insert, edit and remove content sections to certain parts of your site without touching any code, and
• Rearrange how various elements display 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 WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• page lists
• categories
• archive
• customized menus
• links to external sites
• posts that you want to promote
• user comments
• advertising
• testimonials
• surveys
• RSS feed items
• registration box
• product catalog images
• social media share buttons
• display widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your site.

As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website or blog’s capabilities.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.

Typically, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, in the footer area, and even below or above the content.

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

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

(Some themes provide only one widget section)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see that this particular theme only includes one widgetized area …

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

In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains a number of widget-ready areas …

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

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

(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)

How Do I Access My WP Widgets?

The Widgets screen is located inside the WordPress admin area and can be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets section displays 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-and-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 active and can be used on your site.

The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …

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

Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …

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

Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …

(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)

With drag and drop you can easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widgetized sections.

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

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

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

Let’s now change the above widgets in the Active 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 …

This instantly changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

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

Widget Management – Previewing Widgets

Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.

You can do a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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.

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

The ability to manage widgets from your WP 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 configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user experience)

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

Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s 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 the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived published posts section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey results, RSS feed items, product images, social media buttons, 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 give you little to no configuration options)

Most widgets offer additional options 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets give you customizing options!)

Using Widgets

As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips for getting 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 posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Business Owners – WP Plugins
• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please see other posts we have published on this site.

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