In Part One of this tutorial series, we cover the basics of how to use widgets in WordPress.
In this tutorial you will configure a number of sidebar widgets in WordPress.
Sidebar Widget Configuration
By default, your site comes with several built-in active widgets, such as widgets that let you display links to your pages, recent posts, news items, filter content by tags, etc.
(By default, your site comes with several built-in widgets)
How To Set Up Frequently-Used WordPress Sidebar Widgets: Tutorial
In this tutorial series, you will learn how to add, configure and reorder s number of WordPress widgets, including:
- Adding a Support graphic linking visitors to your help page.
- Add a Categories section with a drop down menu.
- Add a Recent Posts section.
- Add a list of your site’s main Pages.
- Display Links on your sidebar.
- Display news items using an RSS Feed section.
- Add a Tag Cloud section.
- Add and configure an Archives section to the sidebar.
The Widgets screen is located in the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed from the WP administration menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
(Widgets Menu)
This loads the Widgets section into your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
Let’s get started …
Add A Text Widget To Your Sidebar
Text widgets are incredibly useful …
(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 your sidebar or other widget sections, such as instructions, image links, reviews and more to your site … just type in text or paste HTML into the content area. You can also add an optional title in the Title field. Remember to save your settings …
(A text widget is extremely versatile!)
Example: Using A Text Widget To Add A Clickable Support Button To Your Sidebar Navigation Area
For this example, let’s set up a clickable contact button on your sidebar navigation menu that takes 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, create or source a graphic image that your visitors can click on …
We’ll set up the clickable Help button to display at the top of the sidebar menu like in the example shown below …
Step 1 – Upload your image.
To display the image on your site, the button image must be uploaded to your server. Upload the button image to your server and note the path to your image location.
E.g. …
http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg
You will need this information in Step 3.
In order for visitors to go to the contact page when they click on the support button, 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 contact page.
Create a contact page on your site and note down its URL …
Step 3 – Create the HTML code for your text widget.
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 image.
Your instructions can be typed in a simple text editor and should 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 with the URL of your image location.
The screenshot below shows the sections of the above code that you 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 understanding basic HTML code, see this tutorial:
Next, go back into your Widgets panel …
(Widgets Panel)
Step 4 – Add a Text widget.
Add a Text widget to your sidebar in the location where your button should display.
In the Available Widgets area, find a Text widget …
(Text widget)
Drag the Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release it at the very top of the Widget Area …
(Dragging and dropping your Text widget)
Step 5 – Configure your widget.
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 the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct URLs into the text area, then click the save button …
Note: Remember to test your contact page and image URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or your button won’t work.
*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***
If adding text with no formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in an HTML paragraph code (note: not required if you’re pasting in formatted content like we’re using in the example for this tutorial).
Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs box not checked …
(Automatically add paragraphs option not selected)
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box ticked …
(Automatically add paragraphs box checked)
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Step 6 – Refresh the web browser.
Once you have added the text widget and formatted content, visit your site and refresh your browser. If all links have been entered correctly, then your clickable support button should display in the site’s sidebar menu …
(Clickable button widget on sidebar)
The screenshot above shows the support contact button added to a newly-installed WordPress site.
Step 7 – Test your widget.
The last step is to ensure that your clickable button works. Test this by clicking on the button. If you are taken to your contact page, then your text widget has been set up correctly …
(Test your clickable button)
Tips:
If you would like a new browser window to open up when visitors go to your contact page (so they don’t leave the page they’re in), then change the button code from this:
To this (i.e. add the section that says: target=”_blank” in the html code):
When adding images to your sidebar navigation area, 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 elements differently depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars are wide and some are narrow. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of your graphic images, then you may have to either adjust the size of your images, or the width of your sidebar column to make the images display correctly on your sidebar section.
(Make sure the width of the image does not exceed the width of the sidebar column)
Additional Tips:
- If you don’t want the image to be centered in the sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the line of code. The image will then align to the left.
- You can link the support button to any URL you want (e.g. to an external site, helpdesk, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the links in your widget.
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This is the end of section two of this tutorial.
Click here to view the rest of this tutorial series:
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