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WordPress Widgets

I just did this video at the request of an ASL community member who said she took my YouTube WordPress video series and was looking for the videos on widgets.

Well I hadn’t made any wordpress widget videos so this is the first one.

In this video you get a very general definition of what a widget is and what a widget does.

The next few videos will show specific widgets and how to use them.

So take in the video above and leave a comment or question.

Here is the transcript of the video. Enjoy.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here from Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. It’s going to be a first in a series of videos about WordPress widgets. Somebody emailed me and said, “Gee, I took your series, and you mentioned in there that you would do some stuff on widgets. What are widgets? Can you do some?” So, I guess I will.

What are widgets? Well, widgets are pieces of software tools that you can put in your sidebars. Now, what do I mean by that? If we take a look at this website, I want to go to the website. Let’s try that again. There is a main area here that has content, then on the right-hand side there is a sidebar. This sidebar is populated by widgets. That’s what widgets are.

Where do you find widgets? When you come here to the left-hand sidebar of your dashboard in WordPress and then here under appearance, you go to widgets. Here is a typical kind of widget page. Now, what defines a widget page is the theme that you selected for your website. Different themes call for different widgets, so you’ll find different widgets populating back here, although there are some very standard ones that always are there. They are, let’s me see. They are categories, links, meta tags, all of these basically you will always find them in Recent, Tag Clouds, Pages, etc. The most important widget, I think, the one you’ll use the most, will be the text widget and we’ll take a look at that in a video.

If you’ve used widgets and then put then to rest, you have a second part down here that says Inactive Widgets. That tells me that I’ve used these widgets before on this website and then I pushed them off for whatever reason, so they are kind of in here and very often, sometimes they get populated with code and then it keeps the code, other times they’re not. In this case, the text widget I did.

So, widgets. Now, why do they call these widgets? I have no clue. It’s just in the vernacular of WordPress. Widgets are software. In this particular theme that I’m using, I have two sidebars. One of them is being used, and the other one is dormant, but in this particular sidebar, I have a custom menu and create information, check it out. I rolled in a widget called Custom Menu. See that here? I didn’t put it there.

Different widgets have different functions. If I wanted a text widget, I could bring it over. Now, the way you bring a widget over is that you take it and you drag it over to the sidebar that you want it in. Now, this has a text widget in sidebar one. If I wanted a text widget in sidebar two, I just drag it over there and then if I don’t want it there anymore, I just drag it and put it back and it will bring it down into the inactive widget and the same holds true here. If I don’t want this text widget, I just drag it out of there and it de-populates.

That’s the extent of this video. A widget is a piece of software that you use to populate the sidebar of your website, and it brings different functionality to that sidebar. You find the widget by going to the Appearance tab, pick selecting widget and it opens up the widget editing page in which you can then take a widget and drag it over and do whatever you want, depending on what you are trying to accomplish on the website.

The next videos, we’re going to start showing what these widgets do exactly, and we’re going to start with a text widget. That’s it. I hope this has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne, Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well and we’ll talk to you soon.

If you find this information helpful, don’t forget to “like”, “tweet”, or “google +1″ the post. Many Thanks.

About Claude Pelanne

Claude Pelanne is an internet marketer and consultant who comes out of television broadcast. He works with start ups and small business to optimize their online business.