How To Customize Your Sidebar

A sidebar always appears on any website page. It’s important to add a sidebar to your website and make it right, be it the purpose or the appearance.

Sidebars of many websites contain their latest posts, their latest podcasts, and so on. People might come directly to a specific page (e.g. your article), and not your home page. So, the sidebar is very useful to make sure people check out other postings on your website.

If you have an email newsletter offer for people to subscribe, or if you want to promote your Facebook page, inserting them in the sidebar will be the best way for people to see.

Many sites also have a search column on the upper side of the sidebar and this is very important. People might want to search for a specific content on your page and through this feature, they can find it easily.

Some sites also use the sidebar to promote their newsletter subscription. Every time visitors visit the page, they can see that they are not members yet and might be prompted to subscribe to the newsletter.

You can also list your most popular articles or postings on the sidebar. Usually you will need certain plug-ins to create multi columns on the sidebar.

You can also put a YouTube video on the side bar, your Facebook page, categories of your articles/postings, advertisements, or images.

However, always keep in mind that simple is the best. Same goes to your sidebar. Visitors will find it easy to look for something if it is simple and straightforward.

It is best to keep the search bar at the top of the sidebar so that visitors can see it without any difficulty.

So, how can you add a sidebar to your website?

Go to your dashboard and go to the left side menu. Find Appearance and click on Widgets.

Here on the Widgets page, you can see the sidebar configuration appears on the middle-to-right side of the page. These are the sidebar widgets. You can add widgets on different areas.

The widgets on the sidebar include Search, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Archives, Categories, and Media.

If you want to delete some of these widgets, simply select and delete them.

For a beginner, you might not have much content so you can include the Categories, Archives, or Recent Comments.

Recent Posts is one of the most important sections you should add to your sidebar.

Now if you go back to your blog post, or any page with a sidebar, you will be able to see the widgets you configured just now.

If you want to change the text here from Recent Posts, you just need to type it on the widgets settings and add the title below the Recent Posts widgets.

You can change it to Latest Updates or Latest Posts.

Save, go back to your page with the sidebar and click Refresh. You will be able to see your recent changes.

Now, let’s get back to the widgets page. On the left, you can see different options that you can choose.

You may want to add a calendar, Tag clouds (all the Tags you have used), add pages, or custom texts.

This is the section where many people add information about themselves such as the About Me or About Us column.

After you are done, click save. You can drag it wherever you want in the sidebar list. It will help the visitors to know more about you and your page.

This is also how you add custom opt-in form. Basically, you can get a DML code from your opt-in form and you can add it here using the text block.

So, that’s the overall process to create your sidebar!

Questions:

1. How to access the “Widgets” page?

2. What are the things included on the sidebar main widgets?

3. How to change the widget’s title?