Tag: Widgets

There are so many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without code editing skills.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.

(WP widgets)

This blog post explains how WordPress widgets work, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help expand the functionality of your website.

What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users

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

Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your site.

The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program web code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.

WP widgets don’t require you to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.

(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)

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

In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:

• Easily add, edit and remove features to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web code, and
• Reconfigure 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 many cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:

• list of pages
• blog categories
• post archives
• custom menus
• links to external sites
• links to recent posts
• recent comments from users
• clickable ads
• customer testimonials
• survey questions & results
• RSS feed content
• shopping cart information
• images
• twitter feeds
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

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

As you will learn shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can enhance your site’s performance.

Widgetized Themes

Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.

Normally, you will find features managed by widgets in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header, the footer section, even above or below your content.

It all depends on the theme you have installed.

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

(Some themes provide only a single widget section)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …

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

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

(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WP theme …

(Multiple widgets 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 area)

Where Can I See My WP Widgets?

To access the Widgets panel log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …

(Widgets Panel)

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

The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …

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

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.

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

Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …

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

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

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

WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)

With drag-and-drop you can easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.

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

1. A subscription form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)

If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget section …

If we change the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

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

The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

This instantly reorganizes the order of items in 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(Widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Let’s go over some more useful things worth knowing about using WP widgets:

Widget Management – Preview Widgets

Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.

You can do many things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 within 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

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

(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can improve user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar section by switching around 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 layout using widgets can 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 website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, customer testimonials or polls, content from RSS feeds, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)

Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize them. 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 customization!)

How To Use Widgets

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

For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 posts useful:

• WordPress Explained – What Are WordPress Plugins
• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress content management platform please see our related posts section.

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