Widgets 301

This week, we’ve talked about navigation on your blog — making it easy for your readers to find your content using custom menus, for example. We’ve already talked about widgets before, in “Widgets 101″ and “Widgets 201,” so let’s continue exploring how we can use them to direct your visitors to different places — and add some texture and color in your sidebar with little effort.

To follow along, head to Appearance >> Widgets in your own dashboard. This is where the magic happens — where we’ll enable widgets by dragging them from the Available Widgets area to the right, where we’d like them to appear on our blog.

Branding Your Blog: Let’s Get Visual 101

Way back in January we set the scene for talking about how visually branding your blog can set it apart from the pack. In today’s follow up we’ll look at one of the hands-on ways you can make that happen — by customizing your headers and sidebars.

Quick Tip: Highlight Comment Conversation with a Widget

Elizabeth has doled out some sage advice on being a good host, being a good guest, and starving trolls to help you cultivate a vibrant and engaged comment section. Hopefully, you’ve now got some good conversation going on. Why not highlight it with the Recent Comments widget?

Widgets 201

In the first post of this series, “Widgets 101,” we introduced some popular widgets, including the Text and Image Widgets, and also mentioned quick ways to transform an image by changing its shape or adding a frame. Since this month is all about photography and phoneography, let’s focus on Image Widgets and explore how to customize them.

Widgets 101

Earlier this week, Krista talked about ways to get widgety on your blog. You’ll find an assortment of widgets in your dashboard (by going to Appearance » Widgets), waiting patiently for you to activate them! So, now what? Let’s zoom in on several ways to transform your sidebar and enhance your site with different widgets.

Quick Tip: Get Widgety

WordPress.com widgets are a great way to add new content such as your Twitter stream, or to display del.icio.us links, a tag cloud and/or a calendar to your blog, either in the sidebar, header, or footer of your site.

To see the widgets you have available to you, log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on Appearance > Widgets. To add a widget, simply click on it and drag it up and over to the right of the widget screen, into the Default Sidebar, Header Area, or Footer Area section of your site. If you choose to use several widgets in your sidebar, for example, you can click and drag them to order them as you see fit.

Here’s a bunch of my favorite widgets: