Tag: WordPress Widgets

There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing application to build and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without having coding skills.

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

(Widgets)

This article explains what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help to add functionality to your website.

What Are Widgets? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)

Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to script PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are made for non-technical users.

WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.

(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)

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

Simply put, widgets allow you to:

• Easily insert, edit and delete functions in parts of your website without having to touch any underlying 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 many features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:

• nested page lists
• site categories
• archive
• menus displaying only selected pages
• links to external sites
• posts that you want to promote
• post comments
• text ads
• quotations
• poll results
• content from RSS feeds
• registration box
• image galleries
• Facebook feeds
• add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole design of your website.

As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further improve your website’s capabilities.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.

Normally, features controlled by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even below the content area.

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

For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …

(Some WP themes only have a single widgetized section)

Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …

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

In contrast, the theme shown below contains multiple widget areas …

(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget areas)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …

(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

To access the Widgets section go to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …

(Widgets Section)

The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.

The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used on your site.

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 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …

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

Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …

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

WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)

Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.

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

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

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

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

If we reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

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

The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …

As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

Here are a few other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:

Widget Management – Previewing Widgets

Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.

You can do several edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing 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 on your site to 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

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

(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)

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

Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve visitor 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 your web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add useful features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS content excerpts, images, social media buttons, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, 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 provide additional options that allow you to further configure things. This can include things like 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 customizing options!)

How To Use Widgets

As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WordPress For Non-Technical Newbies – What Are WP Plugins
• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.

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