How to Design and Add a Banner to Your WordPress Sidebar Widget

In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how to design and add a banner to your WordPress Sidebar Widget along with the HTML code.

What should you put on your sidebar?

✓ Mail Opt-In Form
✓ Mini Bio no longer than 2 sentences
✓ Your own banner ads
✓ Blogroll limited to between 10-20 posts.
✓ Affiliate banner ads limited to no more than 2-3
✓ Search bar (should be at the very top)
✓ Any other text/links that doesn’t run too long that are crucial to your marketing
✓ Anything that adds VALUE
✓ Design all of your banner ads to be the same width. Don’t have different width banners running on your sidebar. If you don’t know what the width of your sidebar is (different themes have different width sidebars), I explain it in a quick video tutorial over here.

What your sidebar shouldn’t have:

✓ Everything and the kitchen sink
✓ Cluttered mess
✓ All the WordPress default sidebar widgets
✓ Things in the wrong order
✓ Links to friends websites, unless you are a personal blog

Still Up for Debate:

✓ Facebook feed: You can’t see a heck of alot in a 250 pixel width. The user will most likely opt to just click on your Facebook link anyway. And if you have social media icons, have them simple and they should be at the top header or the footer, or both. Have them open a new tab rather than the same window so the user is not taken away from your site. The tag for this would be inserting the target=”blank” into your link reference.

For example: <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/thisdesigngirl” target=”blank”>

✓ Twitter Feed: it just looks ugly and cluttered and so 10 years ago.
✓ Page visitors: we are in 1999.