Скачать или смотреть WordPress Training Perth – Enhance a Web Page’s Value Using Widgets

A WordPress Widget is a small block of content or element of functionality that is positioned on the periphery of a website, or any of its individual pages, usually in a region commonly referred to as the sidebar.

Creating and positioning widgets is a very important skill in the management of your WordPress website, as they allow you to present your website visitors with all manner of useful information, tools, devices and resources that relate to the content pages being presented, but are best not placed within that content directly.

Some of the most common items presented to website visitors and widgets in the sidebar area of the site are:

Contact forms
Page or topic-specific menus
Links or resources related to a page’s content
Calls-to-Action
Contact devices such as phone numbers and email addresses
Qualifications and achievements
Banner ads and other forms of promotion
Reviews and testimonials
Third party integrations, e.g. Mail Chimp, CRM, Lead Pages
Plugin-specific menus, e.g. WooCommerce
And the list goes on and on…

Widgets can also appear in a range of other place on your WordPress website including in the header and footer regions. For example, a Site Search widget will often be position in the header region of a website so that it is clearly visible at the top of every page so that website visitors can find it easily. On the other hand, footer widgets are more commonly used for the placement of less commonly consulted page items such as Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy and Copyright statement. These of course are important pages that should be present on all business websites, but because they are of little or no interest to most website visitors, they are most appropriately positioned in footer widgets.

The number of widget areas available on your WordPress website, and their positioning within it are very much a function of the theme you are using. Some themes offer little more than the standard sidebar and footer widget areas, but others allow you to place custom widgets just about anywhere. Therefore, when choosing a theme for your WordPress website, it is important to take into account the number of widgets you plan to use and where you want to place them with the page layout of your site.
To access the Widget Control Panel of the Administration area of your WordPress installation, all you need to do is go to the Appearance » Widgets section in your WordPress dashboard, access through the menu to the left of screen.

Once you arrive in the Widgets management area, you will see a range of pre-made widgets that ship with WordPress by default and those that may have been added by the theme you are using. You may also see a number of pre-made widgets that have been installed by other plugins as part of the functionality they offer. For example, if you are using the WooCommerce eStore plugin, you will find at least a half-dozen WooCommerce widgets available for use. I make extensive use of these third-party widgets myself when setting up WooCommerce powered eStore solutions for my own clients.
Setting up the widgets you require is really a simple matter dragging a pre-made widget into one of the widget areas available within the theme you are using. The image below show the widget areas available through the theme my own WordPress Warrior website is using at the moment.

By comparison to some of the more complex and demanding WordPress websites I have set up for clients, this set of available widget areas is quite modest, however, more tan adequately serves the functionality I require.
So go ahead and watch the video above and learn all about how to create and position a widget on your WordPress website. In this case I will be demonstrating how to create a custom contact form using the generic Text widget, and positioning this in the right-hand sidebar of a website. Enjoy!