Tag: Widgets

There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing application for building and managing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website with no coding skills or knowledge required.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this blog post you will learn how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to help you grow your website or blog.

WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Owners

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

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

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

Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.

WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.

(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code)

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

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

• Easily insert, edit and remove functions in certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
• Rearrange 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 features 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:

• nested page lists
• site categories
• archived content posts
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to resources
• your most popular posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to posts
• advertising banners
• quotations
• poll results
• RSS content excerpts
• newsletter subscription form
• video
• twitter feeds
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

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

As you will see shortly, themes can affect where widgets display on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will help further improve your site’s functionality.

Widget-Ready Themes

Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.

Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header section, in the footer area, and even above or below your content section.

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

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

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

Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …

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

In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-ready areas …

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

Below is the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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 area)

How Can I See My Widgets?

The Widgets area is located within the WordPress administration area and can be accessed from the dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …

(Widgets Screen)

The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.

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

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.

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

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

In a default WordPress installation, 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …

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

Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …

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

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …

(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)

Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.

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 click for support button, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)

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 have been arranged in their active widget bar …

Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …

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

The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …

As you can see, this immediately changes 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) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty cool, huh?

Here are a few more useful things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:

Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer

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

You can do many edits in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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!)

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 any changes (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …

(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor 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 rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or poll results, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.

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

(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)

Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Most widgets offer configurable options!)

Using WordPress Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website 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 improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips on how to get the most 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Website Owners – WordPress Plugins
• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

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

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