Now that you have a basic idea of what a widget is, and what it does in the WordPress Web Building Platform, it’s time to go play around with a few widgets in our website in progress.
So let’s head back over to our dashboard by logging in to our WordPress Website: hotelamazonasgy.com.
Once inside the Dashboard click on Appearance >> Widgets. This will open the Widgets Dashboard.
The above picture is sort of like what our widgets dashboard looks like at present. As you can see, there are a set of widgets in the right sidebar.
Now let’s look on our homepage and see what those widgets are actually doing there.
You know what? Most of those widgets placed in the right sidebar are for blogs. And as I said, I’m not creating a blog here; I’m creating a website. So, I’ll just opt for a fresh start and clear all those widgets out of the right sidebar area
To do that, I just click them, and drag them out to the left.
Great! As you can see, our sidebar area is now clean of widgets, as well as all other widget areas. So this gives us the opportunity of starting on a fresh slate.
Let’s refresh our homepage and see if the changes have taken effect. Bear in mind that when you drag a widget in or out of the widget area, it takes effect immediately. There is no need to click a “Save” Button or anything like that.
As you can see in the above picture, the widgets have been removed from the homepage and our website has a fresh new look.
Great. So it’s time to start adding some widgets. What’s the first widget I would like to add? It’s a Facebook Page Integration Widget. And I’d like to add the Facebook Page Integration Widget to the left hand column of the page.
So let’s go back and look for the Facebook Page Integration Widget.
I’m searching, and guess what? I can’t see this widget!
I scroll up and down and still I can’t see it. It’s simply not there? Why is not there? Because this Facebook Page Integration Widget is a product of the Jetpack Plugin. What’s Jetpack? And what’s a plugin? Those seem like two very confusing terms? Don’t they? Well don’t worry, they will soon lose their mystery.
Plugins fill the gaps on the WordPress Framework. Remember that WordPress started off as a very simple blogging platform. But thousands of coders, web developers and other genius-level creators are constantly working to fill the gaps and make WordPress do just about anything.
Plugins fill the WordPress gaps. So let’s go ahead and look for a plugin that will make the Facebook Page Integration Box available to us. The name of that plugin is “Jetpack.”
So see you in the next lesson: An Introduction to WordPress Plugins.
