There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building and managing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help to supercharge your website.
WP Widget: Understanding Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their site.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your theme 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 many features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- site categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart information
- video thumbnails
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and change the design of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will fine tune your site’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header section, the footer area, even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only a single widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget panel 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, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your current 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how information 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 using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add useful features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or poll results, RSS content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 configuration options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s 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 boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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