Tag: Widgets WP

There are so many benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout with no web programming skills required.

WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

In this article you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your site.

What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners

(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your website.

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 know how to program web code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are made for non-technical users.

Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.

(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)

Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

Simply put, widgets allow you to:

• Easily insert, edit and delete content sections in certain areas of your site without touching any web 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 many great things 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 WP widgets:

• website page list
• content categories
• post archives
• custom menus
• links to resources
• posts that you want to promote
• recent comments from users
• text ads
• testimonials
• survey questions & results
• RSS content excerpts
• shopping cart forms
• image galleries
• social media sharing buttons
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will soon learn, WP themes affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can further fine-tune your website or blog’s features.

Widgetized Themes

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.

Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header area, footer, even below the content.

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

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

(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget enabled area)

Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …

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

In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains a number of widget areas …

(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)

Below is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress theme …

(Multiple widgets areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three 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 Can I See My Widgets?

To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This opens the Widgets section in your web browser …

(Widgets Panel)

The Widgets panel 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 & 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 available for use.

The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …

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

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

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

WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …

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

Using drag and drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.

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. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)

Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget area …

Let’s now change the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …

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

The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

This instantly changes the layout of your 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Cool, huh?

Here are a few other useful things worth knowing about using widgets:

Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section

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

(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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …

(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar by switching 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 elements with 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive 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 clickable images, testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS feed content, product 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)

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

(Many widgets give you configurable 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 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 various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:

• WordPress Features Explained – What Are WP Plugins
• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS software please see other posts we have published on this site.

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