Tag: Widgets

In Part One of this step-by-step tutorial series, we cover the basics of using WordPress widgets.

In this tutorial you will configure various commonly-used WordPress widgets.

How To Configure Sidebar Widgets

By default, your site comes with several preinstalled widgets that can be used out of the box with minimal to no configuration required, such as widgets that let you display links to your site’s pages, recent posts, text or HTML banners, add search features, etc.

(By default, your site comes with several built-in widgets)

How To Set Up Commonly-Used WordPress Widgets On The Blog Sidebar: Step-By-Step Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will add, configure and reorder various widgets to display in your site’s sidebar, including:

• Adding a Contact Us graphic button linking visitors to your contact details page.
• Add a Categories section with a drop down menu.
• Adding a Recent Posts section.
• Adding a list of the site’s most important Pages.
• Display useful Links on your sidebar.
• Displaying news items using an RSS Feed section.
• Adding a Tag Cloud.
• Adding and configuring an Archives section to the sidebar navigation area.

The Widgets area is located inside the WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …

(Widgets Panel)

Let’s configure a text widget …

Adding Text Widgets To The Sidebar Area

Text widgets are incredibly versatile …

(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 your sidebar or other widget sections, such as single lines or paragraphs of text, images, messages and more to your site … simply by typing in text or adding HTML into the content area. You can also add an optional title in the Title field. Remember to save your settings when done …

(Text widgets are versatile!)

Example: Add A Clickable Contact Button To Your Sidebar Menu Using A Text Widget

For this example, let’s set up a clickable help button on your sidebar that will take 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 “help button” graphic image that you will want your visitors to click on …

We’ll set up a clickable button to display at the top of the sidebar section like in the example shown below …

Step 1 – Upload your image.

To display the clickable button image on your site, the graphic image must be uploaded to your server. Upload the image to a folder on your server and write down the URL pointing to your image location.

For example …

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg

You will use this information in Step 3.

For someone to be taken to your contact page when the help button gets clicked, you must either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will then link the button image to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Create a destination page.

Create a contact page 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, you just need to create the instructions for your clickable button.

Your code can be composed in a simple text editor 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 image below shows which sections of the above code you need to replace with your actual contact page and image URLs …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of your text file content to your clipboard when finished.

If you need help figuring out basic HTML code, refer to this tutorial:

• A Basic Guide To HTML For WordPress Newbies

Go back into your Widgets section …

(Widgets Screen)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you would like the support button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, find a Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

Drag your Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release the widget at the top of the Widget Area …

(Dragging and dropping your Text widget)

Step 5 – Configure the widget.

Click on the widget title bar to configure the widget settings. Paste the code with the links to your contact page and graphic button into your text widget content area and click save …

Add a title section to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct URLs into the text area, then click the save button …

Note: Make sure to check all URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or the clickable button will not work.

*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***

If adding text with no formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in paragraphs (note: this is not necessary if you’re typing in formatted content like we’re doing in this tutorial).

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box not selected …

(Automatically add paragraphs box not selected)

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option checked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option ticked)

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Step 6 – Refresh the web browser.

After adding the widget and code, go to your site and refresh the browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then your clickable support button will display at the top of the site’s sidebar menu …

(Clickable support button widget on sidebar)

The screenshot above shows ’click for help’ button in the sidebar of a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test the widget.

The last step is to make sure that the links work. Test this by clicking on the button. You should be taken directly to your support page …

(Test your text widget to ensure you’ve set everything up correctly)

Useful Tips:

If you would like the support page to display inside a new browser window when visitors click on the help (so they don’t leave the page they’re in), then change the text widget code from this:

To this (i.e. add the section that says: target=”_blank” in the text widget code):

When inserting images into your sidebar navigation menu, make sure that the width of your image doesn’t exceed the width of your sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. Note that some themes can display different column widths depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars may be wider or narrower. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of the button image, then you may have to either adjust the image size, or the column width to make graphics display correctly on your sidebar.

(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 be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
• Link the help button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external link, contact form, support forum, etc.) and change this anytime by replacing the links inside the text widget.

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This is the end of part 2 of this tutorial.

Click on this link to continue:

• How To Add Widgets To WordPress – Part Three

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