Text widgets allow you to add extra information to your blog’s sidebar or any other widget area. Mostly people use text widgets in WordPress to add a little introduction about themselves, the website, or they use it to add shortcodes inside widgets. Text widgets are usually very dull looking and boring because they blend in with the other sidebar element. In this quick article, we will show you how to make text widgets more colorful and interesting. The goal is to make them prominent in the sidebar and stand out from your site’s background color, so your visitors pay more attention to it.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Colorful Text Widget plugin. Upon activation, go to Appearance » Widgets. There you will see Colorful Text Widget in the available widgets panel. Drag and drop Colorful Text Widget to your sidebar (aka widget area).
The widget settings are really simple. You would use it like any other text widget. The only extra thing you have to do is add the widget style in the last option. The widget comes with a few built in styles of some basic colors. Copy the color style you want to use and paste it. You can also create your styles in style.css file of your theme.
If you don’t know CSS and just want to add a custom color, then there is an easier way to do that. Just copy and paste the following in your theme’s style.css:
//** Replace background-color and border with your own values **//
.ctw-custom {
background-color: #cccccc;
border: 1px solid #1b1b1b;
border-radius:10px;
-moz-border-radius:10px;
-webkit-border-radius:10px;
-o-border-radius:10px;
margin: 0 0 25px;
overflow: hidden;
padding: 20px;
color: #000;
}
Now to use this style in your widget use .ctw-custom in the Colorful Text Widget’s widget style option. You can create multiple custom styles of your own. Just copy the css, rename .ctw-custom to something else and change the background-color and border values. We hope this quick tip will help you make text widgets more fun and prominent.
Bobby Zopfan says
Good tip.
But had you included one or two photographs of how would color widgets look after you customized their colors would have been greater.
Nico Zentveld says
It is my first time working with word press, I like it and appreciate your input, Thanks!!
Iniyan says
Thanks for the post about our plugin
In recent update we added color picker to change background and text colors.