Tag: What Is A Widget

There are loads of great things about choosing WordPress for building and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no programming skills or knowledge required.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

This post explains how widgets work, what they do and how widgets can enhance the functionality of your website or blog.

About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners

(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your site.

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

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.

Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to touch code.

(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)

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

In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:

• Easily add, edit and delete functionality to certain areas of your website 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 many features you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• website page list
• categories
• blog post archive
• menus that display only selected pages
• links to external sites
• links to your recent posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
• advertisements
• quotations
• poll results
• RSS content excerpts
• newsletter registration form
• product catalog images
• Facebook feeds
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole design of your website or blog.

As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets display on your site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website or blog’s functionality.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.

Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, footer, sometimes even below or above the content.

It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.

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

(Some WP themes provide only one widgetized section)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this WP theme only contains one widget area …

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

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

(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress theme …

(Multiple widgets areas)

As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three 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 WP Widgets?

The Widgets panel is located within your WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the WP admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …

This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser window …

(Widgets Screen)

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

On the right-hand side of the window, you can see 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 screen.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately activated for use on your site.

In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.

By default, 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …

(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …

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

Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

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

(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)

Use drag-and-drop to easily rearrange the layout and order of your website’s widgetized sections.

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

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

(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)

If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …

Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active 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 the sidebar …

This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your 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 section (2) is now located above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

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

Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section

Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 several things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …

(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widget elements in the sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help 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 the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived posts section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or polls, RSS feed items, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.

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

(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)

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

(Most widgets give you configurable options!)

Using WordPress Widgets

As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WordPress Features Explained – What Is A WordPress Plugin
• WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes

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

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