Tag: What Is A Widget

There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software to build and manage your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without programming skills.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.

(WP widgets)

This article explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to improve the functionality of your web site.

WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Users

(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)

Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website.

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

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie users.

Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to edit code.

(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)

Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.

Simply put, widgets allow you to:

• Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code in areas of your site without having to touch any 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 additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• page lists
• categories
• archived blog posts
• custom page menus
• links to external sites
• posts that you want to promote
• comments
• clickable ad banners
• quotations
• surveys
• RSS content excerpts
• newsletter subscription form
• product images
• Facebook feeds
• add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the whole look and feel of your site.

As you will see in just a moment, WP themes affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further enhance your website or blog’s features.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can have widgets in.

Normally, you will find features driven by widgets in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in your site’s header area, in the footer, and even below or above your content.

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

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

(Some themes have only a single widget-ready area)

Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget area …

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

In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …

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

Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …

(Multiple widgets areas)

As you can see, with 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

To use widgets, access the Widgets section located inside your dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …

(Widgets Panel)

The Widgets area displays all the widgets that you currently have available.

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

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)

Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and available on your site.

In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.

In a default WordPress installation, 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …

(By default, 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 WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them right inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …

(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)

Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout and order of your widgetized areas.

For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:

1. An opt-in form,
2. A click for support banner, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)

Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …

If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …

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

The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …

This instantly reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Let’s go over some other things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:

Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer

Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the 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 it’s all done 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 on your site.

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

Widget management 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user experience.

Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?

Absolutely!

With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or polls, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)

Most widgets offer a number of options 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 …

(Many widgets offer configuration options!)

Using Widgets

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

For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips for getting the most out of WordPress using 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Newbies – WordPress Plugins
• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress web content management platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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