Tag: Widgets

There are lots of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web programming skills or knowledge.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.

(Widgets)

In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your website.

What Is A WordPress Widget? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Owners

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your website or blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain areas of your website without touching any web code, and
• Reconfigure 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• nested list of your web pages
• categories
• post archives
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to resources
• most read posts
• user comments
• clickable text ads
• testimonials
• survey questions & results
• RSS feed items
• shopping cart forms
• video galleries
• social media buttons
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. Amazon)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and change the whole look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will improve your site’s capabilities.

Widgetized Themes

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

Usually, widget-driven features can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header, footer, even below the content.

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

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

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

Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that the WP 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 above is in the site’s sidebar area.

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

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

Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 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 section)

How Do I Access My Widgets?

The Widgets area can be easily accessed inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …

(Widgets Screen)

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-and-drop)

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

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use.

The Widgets area 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.

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

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

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

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

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them right inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)

Drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order 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 display:

1. A newsletter opt-in form,
2. A click for support button, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)

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

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

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

The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …

This instantly reorganizes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(Widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool, huh?

Let’s go over some other useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:

Widget Management – Preview Widgets

Depending on the theme that you have installed, 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 these changes to your live website.

You can do several edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing 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 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 before publishing it (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the sidebar section by switching 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.

Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like a member login section, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.

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

(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)

Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 …

(Many widgets offer customizable options!)

How To Use Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many cool tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Website Owners – What Is A Plugin
• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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