Tag: Widgets

There are many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your website without coding skills.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

In this blog post you will learn what WP widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help you to grow your website or blog.

What Are Widgets? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Users

(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)

Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website or blog.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.

WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.

(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)

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

In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:

• Easily add, edit and remove functions in areas of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
• Rearrange how various elements display on ”widgetized” areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.

Here are just some of the cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• page lists
• categories
• archived posts
• customized menus
• links to external sites
• links to your recent posts
• recent comments from users
• clickable text ads
• testimonials
• surveys & polls
• RSS feed content
• newsletter subscription form
• images
• social media sharing buttons
• display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other blog posts, we provide detailed content about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your site.

As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website or blog’s features.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.

Normally, you will find features driven by widgets in the sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, the footer, and even above or below your content.

It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.

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

(Some WP themes only have one widget-ready section)

Below 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, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.

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

(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)

Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …

(Multiple WordPress widget 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)

Where Can I See My Widgets?

The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets area in your browser window …

(Widgets Section)

The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.

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 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 on your site.

In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.

By default, your site already comes with a number of 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …

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

Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your site …

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

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)

Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your website’s widget-enabled 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. A subscription form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress 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 display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …

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

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

The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …

As you can see, this immediately 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 graphic banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(Widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty good stuff, huh?

There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:

Widget Management – Widget Previews

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

You can do a number of edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done in real time. If you like what you’ve 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …

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

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have 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.

Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, client testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, images, Facebook feeds, 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)

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

(Many widgets give you configuration options!)

How To Use Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.

For 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 many cool tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:

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

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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