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Styling WordPress with Widgets and Plugins
Tips and tools that can make these design options work best for you
If you've uploaded and installed Wordpress (WP), you're probably anxious to style your site with widgets and plugins. In this article, Linda provides tips and tools that can make these design options work best for you.
How to Eliminate and/or Alter Current Sidebar Widgets
If you want to eliminate, for instance, the pages that show on the right sidebar or show just one or two pages, then you'll need to use the "Pages" widget. Click on the arrow on the sidebar tool in the right column of the widgets page to open that link:
Next, go to the "Pages" widget, grab it when you click on it
and drag it into that sidebar space. A dotted box will appear when you drag the
widget to that space. If you have widgets already installed in that sidebar,
you may notice that you can drag those widgets around to rearrange them.
Sometimes, though, you may need to close the sidebar and re-open it to be able
to move those widgets around. Why? Who knows. Trust me, it does work.
After you drag the page widget to the sidebar space, that widget will open to look like this:
Now you have options on what you want to show on that sidebar.
You can name that portion differently (instead of "Pages," you might want to
say, "More Information," for instance). You then can sort the pages by page
title, order or ID from that drop down menu under the "Sort by:" link. You also
can exclue pages by ID – as many exclusions as you want, separated by commas.
If I want to eliminate all pages from the sidebar, then I need to discover their ID numbers to install them in that space. One easy way to discover those ID numbers is to "show page source" on the home page window and search for "Pages" on that coded page. You then will find a list of pages with the code that looks like this:
<li class="page_item page-item-103"><a href="YourWebPage" title="Sea Adventures">Sea Adventures</a></li>
The page-item-103 is the item you want, as that number 103 is the page ID. When you add those page Ids to that box shown above, you can eliminate those pages showing on the Web site. I added all the numbers included in that list for pages, added them to the "Exclude" option, saved that option and refreshed the home page. This is what happened:
Notice that every original item on that sidebar has disappeared along with the pages. If I decide to use the pages widget to show one or two pages, the other options still disappear:
As you can see from this experiment, when you add a widget you can eliminate the original default format design. Now, you can add more widgets and you even can replicate the original design by adding those widgets from the widget dashboard.
NOTE: If I want to put the "Welcome" page before the "Destinations" page shown in that Pages link, I would use the page ID to alter their order, since I developed the Welcome page before I developed the Destinations page. You also can adjust the page order by going to that page and altering the order that it falls in development. More about pages in a later article.
Linda Goin
Linda Goin carries an A.A. in graphic design, a B.F.A. in visual communications with a minor in business and marketing and an M.A. in American History with a minor in the Reformation. While the latter degree doesn't seem to fit with the first two educational experiences, Linda used her 25-year design expertise on archaeological digs and in the study of material culture. Now she uses her education and experiences in social media experiments.
Accolades for her work include fifteen first-place Colorado Press Association awards, numerous fine art and graphic design awards, and interviews about content development with The Wall St. Journal, Chicago Tribune, Psychology Today, and L.A. Times.