The sidebar on your blog is simply a strip which runs down the side of your blog. Depending on the theme you are using you can have multiple sidebars however to keep this simple we are going to demonstrate some simple setting up of the sidebar on the Twenty Eleven Theme which is installed by default when you create a new blog.
Here is an image of a typical sidebar.
Click on the image to see the full size view
Notice that there are 4 main widgets which are quite commonly used.
The Text Widget – You can put any text in here that you like
The Categories Widget – This is where our categories will show up as we add posts to them
The Recent Posts Widget – This is where a link to all our posts will be displayed
The Tags Widget – Show all our tags which we have assigned posts
There are plenty of more widgets that you can use however in the aim of keeping it simple lets just work with these for now.
So how did we get all this information in the sidebar?
First of all, make sure you are in your dashboard.
Down on the left hand side you will find the Appearance Menu. Expand this by moving over the appearance tab and click on the down arrow. Click on the widgets menu item.
The Widgets page will then be shown. All you need to do now is simply drag from the main page the widgets you want to appear in the sidebar on your blog.
Click on the image to see the full size view
Once you have dragged a few widgets in to your sidebar, click on your blog name up the top to see what it looks like.
Voila. We now have a sidebar for our blog.
Next Step >>> Step 9. Customising your blogs menu
