Tag: What Is A Widget

There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building and managing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills.

WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help to add functionality to your site.

What Is A WordPress Widget? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)

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

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

Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.

WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.

(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)

Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.

In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in certain parts of your site without having to touch 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 features you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:

• nested list of your web pages
• content categories
• blog post archive
• menus that display only the pages you choose
• links to resources
• links to recent posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
• advertising banners
• user testimonials
• survey results
• RSS content
• shopping cart information
• product catalog images
• twitter feeds
• display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new functionality to WordPress and even change the entire design of your website.

As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can extend your site’s performance.

Widgetized Areas

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

Normally, features managed by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, the footer area, even below the content.

It all depends on the theme that you have installed.

For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …

(Some themes only have a single widget enabled section)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget area …

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

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

(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)

Here is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)

How Do I Access My Widgets?

The Widgets panel is found inside the WP dashboard and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …

(Widgets Panel)

The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.

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 by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use.

The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.

By default, 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …

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

Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …

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

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …

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

Drag and drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order of your widget-enabled areas.

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

1. A subscription form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)

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 they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …

Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag & drop …

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

The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

As you can see, this instantly changes 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 image banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

There are some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:

Widget Management – Previewing Widgets

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

You can do many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all 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 to visitors.

(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 changes (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the sidebar area 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.

Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience.

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

Absolutely!

With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived published posts section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertisements, customer testimonials or surveys, RSS feed content, images, social media buttons, and more.

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

(Some widgets offer little to no customizable options)

Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets offer customizing options!)

How To Use Widgets

As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your site 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 great step-by-step 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 on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress with 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 Features Explained – WP Plugins
• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.

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