Using Widgets on Your Blog

tagcloud1 To beginners, blogging can be quite daunting. Not only do you need to keep thinking of regular great content to keep your readers interest, but you need to understand how the interface works too and some blogging platforms are easier than others to use. However, they all have one thing in common: widgets.

Once you’ve decided on a design and layout for your blog, you need to think about what content to include other than the posts themselves. This content is delivered in the sidebars of your blog and it’s the widgets you choose to put into the sidebars that will deliver this extra content. Widgets can also help visitors to navigate your blog site.

So which widgets should you use:

Recent posts – gives a list of the most recent posts on your blog. You may be able to choose how many to display.

Archives – usually in month format so visitors can browse posts per month in reverse chronological order.

Categories – using categories is a good way to separate posts into different subjects. Here at Savvy Marketers we have 16 categories to divide our content into and you can add new ones whenever you want.

Text – usually an open text field where you can type some useful information. We’ve used the text field at the top left to write a bit about us.

Pages – if you have a few static pages on your blog, you may want to include these pages in the sidebar to help visitors navigate to them.

Recent comments – if your blog is popular, it’s quite nice to display the most recent comments on your posts.

Other – there are many widgets that can be used e.g. to display links to other blogs, your social media profiles, tag clouds that send visitors to posts relating to keywords. You can also include separate widgets so people can subscribe to your blog posts by email or by an RSS feed (I wrote about this earlier this year). Some sites use widgets to display ads.

Here at Savvy Marketers, we’re only using a few of the hundreds of widgets that can be used. You can have fun with widgets but also bear in mind that they can be confusing and distracting to visitors and you may end up putting them off your site or sending them onto another site via a widget. Make sure the widgets you use serve a purpose and will retain visitors or get them to do what you want them to do. With widgets, less is definitely more!