Tag: Widgets

There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring any code editing skills.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

This article explains what WP widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website or blog.

What’s A WordPress Widget? Understanding Widgets For Business Website Owners

(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)

Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your site.

WordPress 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 code.

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.

With WP widgets, you don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance your website.

(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)

Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.

In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and delete content sections in certain areas of your website without having to touch any 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 WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:

• list of pages
• site categories
• archived posts
• menus
• links to external sites
• links to your recent posts
• excerpts of recent comments added to posts
• clickable text ads
• quotations
• survey results
• RSS content
• shopping cart information
• video thumbnails
• social media share buttons
• add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

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

As you will soon discover, themes can affect how widgets display on your site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further enhance your site’s capabilities.

Widgetized Themes

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can show up in.

Usually, features powered by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header, in the footer area, even above or below the content.

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

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

(Some WordPress themes provide only one widgetized section)

Here is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this specific WP theme only includes one widget area …

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

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

(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)

Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WordPress theme …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 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 Do I Access My WP Widgets?

The Widgets panel is located inside your WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …

(Widgets Panel)

The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.

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

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & 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. automatically become active and can be used.

In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.

By default, 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …

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

Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section as new WP plugins are installed on your website …

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

Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all within your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …

(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)

Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order of your site’s widgetized sections.

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

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

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

Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …

Let’s now change these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …

(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …

As you can see, this immediately 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) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Here are a few other things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:

Widget Management – Theme Customizer

Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also 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 several edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 to your site visitors.

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

The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve visitor experience)

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

Reorganizing sidebar layout with 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add useful features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.

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

(Some widgets give you little to no configuration options)

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

(Most widgets provide users with configurable 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 website or blog 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 different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:

• WP For Non-Technical Business Owners – What Are WordPress Plugins
• A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress software please click on links to visit our related posts section.

***

***