Using Widgets in WordPress – Video 12

Now that you’ve chosen and installed a theme, its time to start adding different features to your site.

A simple way to display a specific feature added from a plugin, is to use a widget.

By default, you’ll already have use of several widgets which you can view by going to Appearance > Widgets from your Dashboard.

Some of the widgets already included in a new installation are:

• Blogroll to adds links in your sidebar
• Calender of all your posts
• Text widget for adding html and javascript code
• Recent posts
• Comments

Using Widgets

• Widgets can be easily activated by dragging them into any widget area your theme provides
• To deactivate a widget, simply drag it out of your widget area and into the inactive widgets panel

Premium themes generally offer more widget areas than free themes which makes it easy to add features in your header and footer area’s.

Many plugins include a widget which displays in your widget area once you activate the plugin.

This way you can choose from thousands of different features to add to different areas of your site without the need to create and add code to your theme’s template files.

Next Video

Lets now take a look at all the features in your WordPress editor.