In Part One of this tutorial series, we explained the basics of using WordPress widgets.
In this section you will learn how to configure various widgets in WordPress.
How To Configure Widgets
By default, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets that can be used out of the box with little to no configuration needed, such as widgets that let you display links to your pages, filter posts by categories, text or HTML banners, adding tag clouds, etc.
(By default, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets)
How To Set Up Frequently-Used WordPress Widgets On The Blog Sidebar Menu: Tutorial
In this step-by-step tutorial series, you will learn how to add, configure and reorder various WordPress widgets to display in your site’s sidebar, including:
- Add a Support button linking visitors to the support page.
- Adding a Categories section with a drop down menu.
- Adding a Recent Posts section.
- Add a list of Pages.
- Display important Links on the sidebar section.
- Display the latest news with an RSS Feed section.
- Add a Tag Cloud section.
- Add and configure an Archives section to the sidebar.
The Widgets panel is located inside the WP dashboard and can be easily accessed from the dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
(WordPress Widgets Menu)
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
Let’s start to configure your widgets …
Adding Text Widgets To Your Blog Sidebar
Text widgets are incredibly useful …
(WordPress Text widget)
Rich Text Widget
From version 4.8 onward, WordPress has added native rich-text editing capabilities to text widgets …
(Rich Text Widget)
This lets you quickly and easily format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text …
(Format text easily with the new text widget)
A text widget lets you insert just about anything you want into the sidebar or other widget sections, such as policies, ads, scripts and more to your site … simply by typing in text or inserting HTML into the content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings when done …
(Text widgets are extremely versatile!)
Example: Using A Text Widget To Add A Help Button To The Sidebar Navigation Section
For this example, let’s set up a help button on your sidebar that takes your visitors to a page on your site (or an external site, e.g. a helpdesk) where they can contact you for help and support.
First, you will need to create or source a graphic image that your visitors can click on …
We’ll set up a clickable Help button to display at the top of your sidebar like in the example shown below …
Step 1 – Upload your image.
Upload the image to your server and note down the address of your image location.
E.g. …
http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg
This information will be required in Step 3.
For visitors to be taken to your contact page when the graphic button gets clicked, you will need to either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will then link your button image to this URL in Step 3 …
Step 2 – Add your contact page.
Create a contact page on your site and note its URL …
Step 3 – Compose the code for your text widget.
If you’re not a technical-minded person, don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. Basically, we just need to create the instructions linking your graphic image to your contact page/helpdesk.
Your instructions can be typed in a plain text file and should look something like this …
- Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code with the URL of your contact page location.
- Replace “http://yourimagelocation.com/img/supportbutton.jpg” in the code with the URL of your image location.
The screenshot below shows which sections of the above code you need to replace with your actual web addresses …
Replace the above URLs and then copy all of the above code to your clipboard when finished.
If you need help with basic HTML code, see this tutorial:
Go back to your Widgets screen …
(Widgets Area)
Step 4 – Add a Text widget.
Add a Text widget to your sidebar in the location where the button should display.
In the Available Widgets area, find the Text widget …
(WordPress text widget)
Drag your Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release it at the top of the Widget Area …
(Drag and drop your Text widget)
Step 5 – Configure the widget.
Click on the Text widget title bar to configure its settings. Paste the code with the URLs to your contact page and graphic button into your text widget content area and click the save button …
Add a heading to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination links into the Content area, then click Save when done …
Note: Make sure to check your contact page and image links before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or the button will not work.
*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***
If adding text without formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in an HTML paragraph code (note: not required if you’re typing in HTML code like we’re doing in this tutorial).
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option not selected …
(Automatically add paragraphs box not ticked)
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box selected …
(Automatically add paragraphs box selected)
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Step 6 – Refresh your browser.
After adding your widget and code, visit the front end of your site and refresh the browser. If all links have been entered correctly, then the clickable support button will display at the top of the site’s sidebar menu …
(Clickable button widget on blog sidebar)
The above screenshot shows the button added to a newly-installed WordPress site.
Step 7 – Test the widget.
The last step is to make sure that your destination link works. Test this by clicking on the support button. You should be taken directly to your support page …
(Test the clickable button to ensure you’ve set everything up correctly)
Tips:
If you would like the contact page to open in a new window when visitors click on the help (so they don’t leave the page they’re on), then change the button code from this:
To this (i.e. include the part containing target=”_blank” in the code):
When adding images to your sidebar navigation section, make sure that the width of your image does not exceed the width of the sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. Note that some themes may display different column widths depending on their templates and layout. Some sidebars may be wider or narrower. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of the graphic image, then you may have to either adjust the size of your images, or the width of your sidebar column to make elements display correctly on your sidebar section.
(Adjust column width or reduce image size)
Extra Tips:
- If you don’t want to center the button in your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the line of code. The image will then align to the left.
- Link the contact button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external site, helpdesk, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by replacing the links in your widget.
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This is the end of part 2 of this series of tutorials.
To continue, click this link:
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