Introduction to widgets

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription : now let's begin to make our the appearance of our blog better right so this is our blog so we've so far we've kind of created a bunch of dummy posts and a kind of a few pages I actually created a few other pages let me refresh so that you can see what's going to happen you see so you know sample page so we'll use that soon not yet now what I want to do is talk about widget these are all customizable sort of widgets that you can add and take out of your site and as you notice you might have noticed that in this particular theme in in WordPress language theme is design in those terms are interchangeable you can see that the page actually looks at lines a little like in here but the post starts here the spacing is awkward right and the reason for that is because this theme is made to have another column right here on the right side so let me show you how to do that we go to appearance in our dashboard right if you wanted to see how to go there from the beginning its dashboard appearance and then widgets and in the widgets see they have something called main widget area and a secondary widget area the main widget area is actually the stuff on the bottom and to be honest with you I don't really like having too many things here because look search we already have search here right so it's not really helpful recent posts maybe recent comments not really archives maybe right so let's I like to get rid of a few of these things and the only things I like to keep our things like category and archives and the reason I'd like to keep that is for SEO purposes because it makes the blog easier for Google to crawl and we'll talk about SEO in a little bit but that's just something to keep in mind this meta stuff I don't really care for it right so let's get rid of some of these things search I don't care for it let's delete it recent comments let's think about it meta let's do this for sure recent posts you know we see recent posts right on the blog so we don't actually need to do that alright we'll get rid of it delete that maybe let's keep this and what's really interesting it's actually let's have a secondary area and I want to just show you what's possible so maybe let's make a simple one just text hello and hello there and you will see the effect of that once I save it close that you see now I have something in the secondary area and you will see that now few things are appearing there it looks cleaner and you'll see that the posts are more aligned and there's an area here now this is cool because we can actually do some things here like put an ad this is not a terribly bad converting spot for an ad it's not the best the best is where the eyes are of the person and it's usually on the left side and in the content but this is still above the fold and it's not terrible so we can put some kind of an ad or a call to action or you know maybe an email signup form which we'll do in a little bit so things like that it really depends on what the strategy for your blog is but you can see that for the widgets you can do a lot so we already have a few widgets here so I wouldn't do the categories my RSS is a little bit of outdated thing people don't do it much we can add widgets later because for example if we use email marketing and we use something like MailChimp well mail chip has their own widget and we're going to be able to add MailChimp widget and add that widget to our site so that our site can get email signups so that we can email people when new blog posts are up or if you have anything to announce for now let's say that we are sent here because we don't have a particular strategy for the widgets on the right side but what we've accomplished is now our blog actually looks better space right so it has two columns the columns on the left are more left adjusted so they look more natural and it's beginning to look a little bit more you know like it's supposed to look so let's end this widget section here and you know once we start customizing more deeply we'll get back into it but for now I think we're good let's so so I think that's it for the widget introduction and I think you understand how that works.