Appearance/Widgets Menu

Widgets:

Widgets are little extras that are normally common to all of your different pages.
They reside in “widget areas” that are places like the sidebars, left, right or both, and down at the bottom of every page in the place called the footer.
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There are a few widgets common to the basic install of wordpress, things like a search box, login links, sometimes a menu for your pages, blog links.

One widget is a text box which can be typed in with your contact details.
The middle of the page is the “available widgets”, each one that you want gets dragged and dropped into the widget area on the right hand side. If your theme has side columns, one of these widget areas will be for one of your widget areas/column.

For a contact box in a column, a text widget gets dragged over, opened up with the little arrow, typed in and saved. It then shows up on each and every page that you create.

The lower part in the middle is for “inactive widgets”. It’s a holding area for something you have filled in and not too sure if you really want to use it. It is dragged from the live widget area/column and dropped into the “inactive widgets” in the middle bottom area, this saves its settings or words.

The middle widget area content is increased by downloading and installing a lot of extra plugins/ widgets.
Things like adsquares, photo display, contact forms.

Trying out new widgets is not a task for a beginner, they have to be downloaded/uploaded to your website and activated. It’s also a trial and error, some widgets work as they should others don’t.

With the existing widgets . . . best advice, have a play . . . . drag and drop one at a time to a widget area, refresh a page you would see as a visitor to your site and see where the new widget is placed. Drag it out of one widget area and drop it in another and see where it goes with a refresh. This is the easiest way to learn what and where these widget areas are.

An easy one to check in this manner is a “search widget”
Sometimes your page needs refreshed a couple of times to see the change.

Different themes have changeable amounts of widget areas.
The Primary widget area is normally the main side column in your theme template. If you have a column on both sides of a webpage, then try out the primary one as being the left hand column. Secondary widget area is probably the right hand column in a 2 sidebar template, or if only a right hand column then it will be the Primary.

Plugins are in another article.