The Vertical Learning Curve

Or how to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks

Widgets can do all sorts of things but most importantly they're the thingamy-bobs that show the navigation on your site.

Drag the widgets across to the place you want to drop them and they will show up on every page on your site.

All themes in WordPress have different setups for the widgets but they will all have a Primary Sidebar or a First Sidebar. When you first start on WordPress stick to this Primary Sidebar or First Sidebar

First, find your widgets.

Go to your dashboard - Appearance - Widgets

You will see the list of available widgets in the centre column and, depending upon your theme, you will be confronted by a list in your right hand column of the places that you can place your widgets.

Let's have a look at a working WordPress with a screenshot of the widgets page on Granny's website. Her theme has only two places for widgets - a sidebar and a footer

Another working WordPress site (my cat's site) has four places for widgets

The WordPress Twenty Ten Theme has 6 widgets

All themes in WordPress have different setups for the widgets but they will all have a Primary Sidebar or a First Sidebar. This is the one you should begin using.

What will we put in the Sidebar?

Start with your Recent Posts. You can rename this and choose the number of posts that you want to show

 

OK. Let's put the Pages in here too

Good things come in threes. Let's use one more widget, the Search widget. Drag that across to your sidebar

Go and look at your site, You will see the widgets you placed in the sidebar on every page. You can move them up and down, they don't have to stay where you first put them