Wordpress Clinic - Using widgets Effectively

Hello to you all, this is another training from me, I have decided to change the name of theses training tutorials from, HTML for beginners to Wordpress Clinic, because the mere mention of HTML seems to scare people off and I will be continuing to teach HTML but only in the context that you need to understand in-order to use WordPress more effectively

I have been here for six months now and it has come to my attention that a lot of people struggle with Wordpress and I know you all want to make your sites as good and as effective as possible, so I will be doing these WordPress clinics now to show you all about using WordPress and I will be mixing in some HTML training with it, so as to give you all the best possible training I can

So in this tutorial we will be learning all about widgets, as these can add some real benefits and functionality to our websites and marketing efforts, I will always teach these tutorial with no assumptions, in other words I will not assume you have any knowledge of this subject, so as not to miss anybody out and make sure you all understand WordPress from the core rather than the surface, so lets begin

An introduction to widgets in WordPress

Well what are widgets, put simply as I like to do, they are used to add content to your sidebars, it is important to understand that every theme is different and will come with a different set of widgets but their are a few generic ones that come will almost all themes and as we go through this training we will be disusing some of the generic widgets and how to use them to enhance your website.

How to access your widgets

Go to your dashboard and scroll down and click on appearance there you will see a drop down menu and you can clearly see the Widgets tab once you click on this you will be taken to your widgets area, you will notice that I have the Genesis theme so my widgets will not be exactly the same as yours but don't worry they all work in the same way in WordPress, which ever set of widgets you have.

Here is what my widgets in one of my sites look like

So lets talk about the text widget first as this is one of the most common widgets used and its very versatile, I will show you first what the side bar looks like on my ovulation site so you can see how the widgets are displayed live on the site

Here you can see I have a picture of me and some text as well as above an RSS feed which is also in a text widget

The text widget is used for text and HTML so you can write content in them as well as using them for things like RSS feeds and putting in images, you need to put the HTML code of the image in the text Box to display an image in the side bar and I will show you how to do this next.

I will do a separate tutorial on RSS feeds, lets get the basics right first, then I will explain RSS in another tutorial, as there is quite a bit to know about RSS feeds.