Tag: Sidebar Widgets

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

In this section you are going to configure various frequently-used WordPress sidebar widgets.

Widget Configuration

By default, your site comes with a number of pre-installed active widgets, such as widgets that let you display links to your site’s pages, filter posts by categories, RSS feed content, adding a search box, etc.

(By default, your site comes with several built-in widgets)

How To Configure Commonly-Used Widgets On Your Blog Sidebar Navigation Area: Step-By-Step Tutorial

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

• Add a Help graphic linking to the support page.
• Adding a Categories section.
• Add a Recent Posts section.
• Add a list of Pages.
• Display important Links on your sidebar.
• Display news items using an RSS Feed section.
• Add a Tag Cloud section.
• Configure how your Archived Posts display on the sidebar.

The Widgets area is located inside the admin area by going to Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets panel into your browser window …

(Widgets Area)

Let’s get started …

Add A Text Widget To The Blog Sidebar

Text widgets are incredibly 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 let you insert just about anything you want into the sidebar navigation area or other widget sections, such as email and contact information, image links, messages and more to your site … just by typing in text or inserting HTML into the widget content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings …

(Text widgets are really useful!)

Example: Add A Clickable Support Button To Your Sidebar Menu Using A Text Widget

For this example, let’s set up a clickable help button on your sidebar navigation area that will take your 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, you will need to 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 your sidebar like in the example shown below …

Step 1 – Upload your image.

To display the clickable button image on your site, the button image must be uploaded to your server. Upload the button image to your server and note down the path to your image location.

E.g. …

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

This information will be required in Step 3.

In order for someone to be taken to your contact page when they click on the graphic button, either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will then link the button image to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Create a support page.

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

Step 3 – Create your text widget code.

If you’re not a technical-minded person, don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. Basically, we just need to create the instructions linking the button image to the destination URL.

Your code can be typed in a simple text file and will look something like this …

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

The image below shows the sections of the above code that you will need to replace with your actual contact page and image URLs …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of your text file content to your clipboard when finished.

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

• An HTML Primer For Non-Geek WordPress Site Owners

Now, go back into your Widgets section …

(Widgets Area)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you want the clickable button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, select a Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

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

(Drag-and-drop your WordPress text widget)

Step 5 – Configure your widget.

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

Add a title section to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination URLs into the Content box, then click the save button …

Note: Make sure to check all URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or the clickable button will not work.

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

If you’re adding text without formatting tags, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in an HTML paragraph code (note: this is not necessary if you’re pasting in formatted content like we’re doing in this tutorial).

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option not checked …

(Automatically add paragraphs box not selected)

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option ticked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option checked)

***

Step 6 – Refresh your web browser.

After adding the text widget and HTML code, go to the front-end of your site and refresh your web browser. If all links have been entered correctly, then your clickable support button will display at the top of the sidebar menu …

(Clickable support button widget on blog sidebar)

The above screenshot shows the support contact button in the sidebar of a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test your widget.

The final step is to make sure that your clickable button works. Test your button to make sure that your visitors will go to the contact page when clicking the button. You should be taken directly to the contact page …

(Test your text widget)

Useful Tips:

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

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

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

(Adjust column width or reduce image size)

Extra Tips:

• If you don’t want your button image to be centered inside your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the HTML code. The image will then align to the left.
• You can link your support button to any URL you want (e.g. to an external link, helpdesk, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by replacing the links in your widget.

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This is the end of section two of this tutorial about using Widgets.

Click here to continue:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To Your Sidebar Section – Part Three

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