Tag: WordPress Widgets

In Part One of this step-by-step tutorial series, we cover the basics of how to use WordPress widgets.

In this section you are going to configure a number of sidebar widgets in WordPress.

How To Configure Sidebar Widgets

By default, your site comes with a number of preinstalled widgets, such as widgets for displaying links to your site’s pages, filter posts by categories, RSS feed content, add a search box, etc.

(By default, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets)

How To Configure Sidebar Widgets: Tutorial

In this step-by-step tutorial, you will learn how to add, configure and reorder various widgets to display in the site’s sidebar, including:

• Adding a clickable Support Contact image linking to your help page.
• Adding a Categories section with a drop down menu.
• Adding a Recent Posts section.
• Adding a list of your site’s most important Pages.
• Display important Links on the sidebar.
• Adding an RSS Feed section.
• Add clickable tags using a Tag Cloud section.
• Configure how Archived Posts display on the sidebar menu.

The Widgets area can be accessed inside the WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …

(Widgets Area)

Let’s begin by configuring WordPress text widgets …

Text Widgets

Text widgets are incredibly useful …

(Text widget)

Rich Text Widget

From version 4.8 onward, WordPress has added native rich-text editing capabilities to text widgets …

(Rich Text Widget)

This lets you quickly and easily format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text …

(Format text easily with the new text widget)

A text widget can be used to add lists, images, tips and more to your site … simply by typing in text or adding HTML into the widget content area. You can also add an optional title in the Title field. Remember to save your settings …

(A text widget is extremely versatile!)

Example: Add A Clickable Contact Button To The Sidebar Section Using A Text Widget

For this example, let’s set up a contact button on the sidebar that takes your visitors to a page on your site (or an external site, e.g. a helpdesk) where they can contact you for help and support.

First, create or source a “help button” graphic image that visitors can click on …

We’ll set up a clickable Help button to display at the top of the sidebar like in the example shown below …

Step 1 – Upload your image.

Upload the graphic image to your server and note the address of your image location.

E.g. …

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg

This information will be used in Step 3.

For someone to go to your contact page when they click on the help button, you must either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will then link the button image to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Add your contact page.

Create a contact page and note the page URL …

Step 3 – Create your text widget code.

If you’re not a technical-minded person, don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. Basically, we just need to create the instructions linking the button image to the contact page/helpdesk.

Your instructions can be written a plain text file and should look something like this …

• Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code above with the URL of your contact page location.
• Replace “http://yourimagelocation.com/img/supportbutton.jpg” in the code above with the URL of your image location.

The screenshot below shows the sections of the above sample code that you will need to replace with the actual web addresses …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of your text file content to your clipboard when finished.

If you need help understanding basic HTML code, see this tutorial:

• A Basic Guide To HTML Tags For Beginners

Go back into your Widgets section …

(Widgets Panel)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you would like the clickable button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, select the Text widget …

(Text widget)

Drag the Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release it at the very top of the Widget Area …

(Dragging and dropping your WordPress text widget)

Step 5 – Configure the text widget.

Click on the widget title bar to configure the widget options. Paste the code with the URLs to your contact page and graphic button into the text widget content area and click save …

Add a title to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination URLs into the Content area, then click the save button …

Note: Remember to check all links before pasting scripts into the Text Widget, or the clickable button will not work.

*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***

If adding text without formatting tags, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in paragraphs (note: this is not necessary if you’re typing in formatted content like we’re doing in this tutorial).

Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs option not selected …

(Automatically add paragraphs option not checked)

Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs box ticked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option selected)

***

Step 6 – Refresh the web browser.

Once you have added the text widget and content, go to the front end of your site and refresh your browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then the support button will display at the top of the sidebar menu …

(Clickable support button widget on blog sidebar)

The above screenshot shows the support contact button in the sidebar of a newly-installed WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test the widget.

The last step is to ensure that your destination link works. Test the button to make sure that your visitors will go to the support page when clicking the graphic image. If you are taken directly to your support page, then your text widget has been set up correctly …

(Test your text widget to ensure you’ve set up everything correctly)

Text Widgets – Useful Tips:

If you want the support page to display inside a new browser window when visitors click on the support (so they don’t leave the page they’re in), then change the button code from this:

To this (i.e. include the section containing target=”_blank” in your code):

When choosing images to add to your sidebar navigation section, make sure that the width of the image doesn’t exceed the width of your sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. As mentioned earlier, some themes may display elements differently depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars may be wider or narrower. If your theme’s sidebar is narrower than the width of the button images, then you may need to either adjust the graphic size, or the column width to make the images display correctly on your sidebar.

(Make sure that the width of the image does not exceed the width of the sidebar column)

Extra Tips:

• If you don’t want to center the button in your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the line of code. The image will then align to the left.
• Link the help button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external site, contact form, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the code inside the widget.

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This is the end of section 2 of this tutorial about using Widgets.

Click here to continue:

• How To Add And Configure WordPress Widgets On The Blog Sidebar – Part Three

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