Chapter 12: Widgets

Your pages are built and your menu is in place. Now let’s look at Widgets.

A widget is a small block of content that sits outside your page content: in the sidebar beside your pages, or in the footer at the bottom of every page.

Because widgets show up on every page, they’re a good place for things visitors should always be able to find, like your business hours.

Open the Widgets Screen

From your WordPress dashboard, go to: Appearance → Widgets

The screen is split into two parts:

• Available Widgets on the left. These are all the widgets you can use.
• Widget areas on the right. These are the places in your theme’s layout where widgets can go.

Widget Areas

GeneratePress gives you these widget areas:

Right Sidebar	The column beside your page content.
Left Sidebar	Only shows if your layout uses a left sidebar.
Header	Inside the header, beside your site title or logo.
Footer Widget 1–5	Columns near the bottom of the page. The Customizer sets how many show.
Footer Bar	The bottom strip with the copyright line.
Top Bar	A thin strip above the header. It only appears once it has a widget.

For our website, we’ll use the Right Sidebar and Footer Widget 1.

Available Widgets

WordPress describes each widget in one line, right on the Widgets screen:

Archives	A monthly archive of your site’s Posts.
Audio	Displays an audio player.
Block	A widget containing a block.
Calendar	A calendar of your site’s posts.
Categories	A list or dropdown of categories.
Custom HTML	Arbitrary HTML code.
Gallery	Displays an image gallery.
Image	Displays an image.
Meta	Login, RSS, & WordPress.org links.
Navigation Menu	Add a navigation menu to your sidebar.
Pages	A list of your site’s Pages.
Recent Comments	Your site’s most recent comments.
Recent Posts	Your site’s most recent Posts.
RSS	Entries from any RSS or Atom feed.
Search	A search form for your site.
Tag Cloud	A cloud of your most used tags.
Text	Arbitrary text.
Video	Displays a video from the media library or from YouTube, Vimeo, or another provider.
WPForms	Display a form. (Added by the WPForms plugin.)

You won’t need most of these for a small-business website. The one you’ll use most is Text.

Widgets You Already Have

Look at the Right Sidebar. WordPress already put three Block widgets there when it was installed: Search, Recent Posts and Recent Comments.

Here’s where they show up on your website:

Recent Posts only shows “Hello world!” and Recent Comments only shows the sample comment. Neither one does anything for a small business, so we’re going to remove them.

Remove a Widget

To remove a widget:

1. Click the widget’s name bar to open it.
2. Click Delete.

That’s it. The widget disappears from the widget area and from your website.

We deleted Recent Posts and Recent Comments, and kept Search.

Add a Widget

There are two ways to add a widget:

• Drag it from Available Widgets and drop it into a widget area.
• Click it, choose a widget area from the list that opens, and click Add Widget.

Either way, the widget opens so you can fill it in. When you’re done, click Save. The button changes to Saved.

We added a Pages widget to the Right Sidebar. It lists every page on your website automatically.

Add Your Hours to the Footer

Now for the widget your visitors will actually use: your business hours.

We dragged a Text widget into Footer Widget 1, typed Hours in the Title box, and typed the hours into the Visual tab, the same way you’d type in a word processor:

Monday–Friday: 8am–6pm
Saturday: 8am–1pm
Sunday: Closed

Call (352) 555-0123

Then we clicked Save.

Because it’s in the footer, your hours now show at the bottom of every page:

Edit or Move a Widget

To edit a widget, click its name bar to open it, make your changes and click Save.

To change the order within a widget area, drag the widget up or down. To move it to a different widget area, drag it there.

Widgets — Done!

You now know how to:

• Find the Widgets screen.
• Recognize widget areas and available widgets.
• Remove widgets you don’t need.
• Add a widget by dragging or clicking.
• Put your business hours in the footer.
• Edit and move widgets.

Next, we’ll set up Email for your website.

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