Tag: Widgets

There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without web coding skills.

WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this post you will learn what widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your web site.

WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Owners

(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your website.

The WordPress software is written using a web 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 the above sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.

WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your site.

(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)

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

Simply put, widgets let you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and remove features to certain parts of your site without touching any underlying 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:

• website page list
• categories
• post archives
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to resources
• links to recent posts
• post comments
• clickable ads
• customer testimonials
• survey results
• RSS content excerpts
• newsletter subscription form
• videos
• twitter feeds
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. Amazon)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the design of your website.

As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine tune your site’s features.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can show.

Usually, you will find widget-powered features in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header section, footer, and even below the content.

It all depends on what theme you have installed.

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

(Some WP themes only provide a single widgetized area)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …

As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.

In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …

(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)

Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)

How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?

The Widgets area is found within the WP admin area and can be accessed from the WP administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up the Widgets screen in your web browser …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)

Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the screen.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used on your site.

In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. 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, Categories, etc. to visitors …

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

Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your site …

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

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …

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

Use drag and drop to easily reconfigure the layout of your website’s widget-enabled areas.

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

1. A newsletter subscription form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features display on your 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 …

If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …

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

The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …

As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Cool, huh?

There are some other useful things worth knowing about using WP widgets:

Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section

Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage 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 your live website.

You can do lots of edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your active 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 to your site visitors.

(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)

The ability to manage widgets from within your WP dashboard 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 any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar by switching around 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.

Reorganize 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or survey results, RSS content excerpts, video thumbnails, 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 give you little to no configurable options)

Many widgets offer additional options 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets provide users with configuration options!)

How To Use WP Widgets

As you have 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 tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips for getting the most 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WP For Business Owners – What Are WordPress Plugins
• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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