Tag: Sidebar Widgets

In Part One of this tutorial, we explained the basics of using WordPress widgets.

In this tutorial you are going to begin configuring a number of WordPress widgets.

Configuring Widgets

By default, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets, such as widgets that let you display links to your site’s pages, filter posts by categories, RSS feed content, filter content by publish dates, etc.

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

How To Set Up Widgets On The WordPress Sidebar Area: Step-By-Step Tutorial

In this step-by-step tutorial, you are going to add, configure and reorder various WordPress widgets to display in your site’s sidebar, including:

• Add a clickable Support graphic button linking to the contact details page.
• Add a Categories section with a drop down menu.
• Add a Recent Posts section to display the latest posts.
• Adding a list of your site’s main Pages.
• Display useful Links on the sidebar navigation section.
• Adding an RSS Feed section.
• Add a Tag Cloud.
• Configure how Archived Posts display on your sidebar navigation area.

To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …

(Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …

(Widgets Section)

Let’s begin by configuring text widgets …

Add A Text Widget To The Blog Sidebar

Text widgets are versatile …

(Text widget)

Rich Text Widget

From version 4.8 onward, WordPress has added native rich-text editing capabilities to text widgets …

(Rich Text Widget)

This lets you quickly and easily format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text …

(Format text easily with the new text widget)

Text widgets can be used to add notices, social media buttons, special promotions and more to your site … simply by typing in text or pasting HTML into the content area. You can also add an optional title in the Title field. Remember to save your settings when done …

(Text widgets are extremely versatile!)

Example: Use A Text Widget To Add A Clickable Contact Button To The Sidebar Section

For this example, let’s set up a help button on the sidebar that takes visitors to a page on your site (or an external site, e.g. a helpdesk) where they can contact you for help and support.

First, create or source a “help button” graphic image that your visitors can click on …

We’ll set up a clickable button to display at the top of the sidebar area like in the example shown below …

Step 1 – Upload your image.

Upload the image to the images folder in your server and note the address of your image location.

E.g. …

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg

This information will be required in Step 3.

In order for visitors to go to your contact page when the support button gets clicked, you will need to either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will link the button graphic to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Add the destination page.

Create a contact page on your site and note the page URL …

Step 3 – Compose your text widget code.

Don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. In simple terms, we just need to create the instructions for your clickable button.

Your instructions can be composed in a plain text file and should look something like this …

• Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code with the URL of your contact page location.
• Replace “http://yourimagelocation.com/img/supportbutton.jpg” in the code with the URL of your image location.

The image below shows which sections of the above code you need to replace with your actual web addresses …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of the above code to your clipboard when finished.

If you need help understanding basic HTML code, see this tutorial:

• Formatting Content Using HTML Basics For WordPress Beginners

Now, go back into your Widgets area …

(Widgets Panel)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you would like your support button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, select the Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

Drag your Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release the widget at the top of the Widget Area …

(Dragging and dropping your Text widget)

Step 5 – Configure your widget settings.

Click on the widget title bar to configure the widget settings. Paste the code with the URLs to your contact page and graphic button into the text widget content area and click save …

Add a title section to your widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct URLs into the Content area, then click Save when done …

Note: Make sure to test your contact page and image URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or the clickable button won’t work.

*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***

If you’re adding text with no formatting tags, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in paragraphs (note: not required if you paste in HTML content like we’re using in the example for this tutorial).

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box not selected …

(Automatically add paragraphs option not checked)

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option checked …

(Automatically add paragraphs box selected)

***

Step 6 – Refresh your browser.

Once you have added your widget and HTML content, go to the front end of your site and refresh the web browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then the clickable support button should display in the sidebar menu …

(Clickable button widget on sidebar)

The above screenshot shows the contact button added to a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test the widget.

The last step is to make sure that the destination link works. Test this by clicking the button. If you are taken directly to the support page, then everything has been set up correctly …

(Test your text widget to make sure you’ve set everything up correctly)

Text Widgets – Useful Tips:

If you would like your support page to display in a new browser window when visitors click on the support (so they don’t leave the page they’re on), then change the code from this:

To this (i.e. include the section that says: target=”_blank” in your html code):

When choosing images for your sidebar navigation area, make sure that the width of the image does not exceed the width of your sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. Note that some themes can display elements differently depending on their templates and layout. Some sidebars are wide and some are narrow. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of your graphic image, then you may need to either adjust the image size, or the column width to make elements display correctly on your sidebar section.

(Make sure that the image width does not exceed the sidebar column width)

Additional Tips:

• If you don’t want to center the image in your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the code. The image will then be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
• Link your support button to any URL you want (e.g. to an external link, helpdesk, forum, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the code in your text widget.

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This is the end of section two of this tutorial series.

To continue, click here:

• Adding WordPress Widgets To The Sidebar Menu – Part 3

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