Tag: What Is A Widget

There are many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website without programming skills.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

This blog post explains what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you to grow your website.

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

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your WP site.

WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to write PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.

WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.

(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code)

Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.

Simply put, widgets allow you to:

• Easily add, edit and remove content sections to areas of your website without touching any web code, and
• Reconfigure 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 functions you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• list of pages
• blog categories
• archive
• menus
• links to external sites
• most read posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
• advertising
• customer testimonials
• surveys
• RSS feed content
• subscription form
• images
• social media buttons
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your website.

As you will see in a moment, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further improve your website’s features.

Widgetized Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can add widgets to.

Usually, you will find widgets at work in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header section, the footer area, even below or above your content area.

It all depends on the theme you have installed.

For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …

(Some WP themes only provide a single widgetized section)

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

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

In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-enabled areas …

(Many WP themes offer users multiple widgetized sections)

Here is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …

(Multiple WordPress widget 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)

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

The Widgets area can be accessed inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …

(Widgets Panel)

The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.

The right-hand section of the window displays 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. immediately become activated for use.

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

In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …

(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

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

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

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

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

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

Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.

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

1. A newsletter opt-in form,
2. A click for support button, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)

If we could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …

Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …

(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)

The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …

As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Easy, huh?

Let me show you some more useful things worth knowing about using widgets:

Widget Management – Theme Customizer

Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.

You can do a number of edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 dashboard is a valuable 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in the sidebar by switching around 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 help to improve user experience.

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

Absolutely!

With most static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or poll results, RSS content, videos, social media buttons, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customization)

Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets provide users with customizing options!)

How To Use WP Widgets

As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress site 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many great tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Business Owners – What Are WordPress Plugins
• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

***

***