Tag: Widgets

There are many great benefits to using WordPress for managing and growing your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without code editing skills.

WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

In this article you will learn what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your website.

About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For New Users

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.

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

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.

Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to touch code.

(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)

Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.

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

• Easily add, edit and remove functionality to parts of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
• Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress theme 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:

• list of pages
• post categories
• archive
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to resources
• your most read posts
• user comments
• advertisements
• testimonials
• survey questions & results
• content from RSS feeds
• customers login section
• video galleries
• social media buttons
• add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• 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 these can add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will see shortly, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further extend your website’s usability.

Widgetized Themes

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

Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, in the footer, sometimes even below the content.

It all depends on what theme you have installed.

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

(Some themes only have a single widget-ready section)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized 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 below contains a number of different widget-ready areas …

(Many themes offer users a number of widget areas)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

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

How Do I Access My WP Widgets?

The Widgets screen is located within your WP dashboard and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets section in your browser …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets area displays 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 & drop)

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

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

In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …

(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …

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

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)

Drag & drop technology lets you easily reorder the order of your website’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 newsletter subscription form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)

Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …

Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main 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 reordered in your sidebar …

As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

Here are some other things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:

Widget Management – Previewing Widgets

Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize 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 several edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current 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!)

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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …

(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching 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.

Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve user experience.

Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?

Absolutely!

With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertisements, customer testimonials or polls, RSS feed content, images, Facebook feeds, and more.

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

(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)

Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)

How To Use Widgets

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

For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Business Owners – Plugins
• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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