Widgets - an introduction

As well as the content you'll be writing on your blog, it's the widgets that will bring it to life. WordPress provides you with 12 standard widgets (which will be 'blogged' about later) and thanks to the many people who contribute to WordPress there are many many more widgets for you to download and install.

When you view the widgets section, take a look on the right hand side of your screen and you may see a drop down menu beneath the header Current Widgets, some themes have more than one column, some allow you to place widgets across the footer (bottom) of your blog. Take a couple of minutes to add some widgets to the various columns within the drop down menu to understand how your theme manages them, you may decide that you want some themes across your footer or in a column or you may decide that you don't want any.

Once you've finished playing with the columns, and understand your theme fully, decide which widgets you want and where on your blog. You can add them with a click of a button and many of the widgets have their own little controls to allow you to edit them in some way.

A nice little extra feature WordPress have in the control panel is the ability to organise the order of your widgets, you can do this by selecting them in the desired order, or better still (and the geek in me thinks this is cool) you can drag & drop the widgets (on the right your screen - the one's you've selected) and place them in your desired order.

I'd recommend selecting the widgets, saving and then right clicking the 'view site' link (top left) and opening it in a new window, you can then view your site and if you want to change it, back in the original window in your admin section/control panel make the desired changes, save it, then jump back to the window with your blog and hit refresh or F5.

Now I'm sure you want to play with your appearance even more, so crazy with your widgets!