Adding An Image To Your Wordpress Sidebar

What Is a Text Widget

Anyone who has a Wordpress Blog will at some stage want to begin adding an image to your Wordpress sidebar of your blog. There are several reasons you might want to do this, although the most common is to show an image that if for an affiliate offer you might be promoting. Some other reasons might be to display your contact details on other social networks. Have a look over on the right of this article, and you can see my Google Reader, Digg, Facebook images. These images also are embedded with a clickable link too, and I will show you how to do that.

So, firstly before you begin adding an image to your Wordpress sidebar, you will have to find or create your image that you want to use, and then you will have to either upload it to your server, or if you have permission, hotlink from someone else on the Internet. Having it on your own server is more desirable, as you will have a lot more control over it.

Uploading An Image To Your Server

Uploading the image to your server can be done in a couple of ways. You could either use the Wordpress Admin panel and insert the media via the post section as you would do if you were adding an image to your post or article, or the easier and desired way would be to FTP the image across to the server. Whichever method you choose, ensure you copy the URL of where the image resides on the server, as you will need this when you create your HTML Text Widget. If you want your image to have an embedded link (you can click the image to go to a new URL) then you must also have your URL so you can begin to create the HTML.

How To Add a Text Widget

The next step is to get into your Wordpress Admin panel and go to Appearance>>Widgets section and here you can now add a Text Widget to the sidebar where you want the image showing. Many Wordpress Themes have multiple sidebars, so you may have to play around a little till you find the right one. When you do select a new Text Widget, be aware that you can drag it to be in any position in the order of other widgets you have there.

Now you have to assemble your HTML code and I will give you the basic code here, which you can use and change to your liking:

<p><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”><img src=”http://yourdomain.com/imagelocation/imagename.gif”></a></p>

All you have to do is change the code to reflect the URL you want it to go to, and insert the URL location of where your image resides on your server.

From here, it is just a matter of saving your changes and then head over to your Wordpress Blog to see how it all looks. You may have to play around with the size of the image so it fits nicely in the sidebar without making the blog do anything strange.

Adding an image to your Wordpress sidebar is actually a very simple process, and once you have done it, it will become second nature to do it any other time.

Tagged as: adding, html, image, sidebar, text, theme, widget, Wordpress