This week, I’m working on a new theme for one of our sites that have been using the same theme since 2008. Definitely time for a change. It’s not just a fresh design. I’m actually changing themes to Builder so I can have a radically different design on some pages and they must be responsive. Why? Let’s just say it has to do with an app I’m building 🙂

Photo credit: Kahana

Anyhow, a lot of themes now make heavy use of widgets and frankly I love it. Widgets are the best things because they make updating small portions of a site so easy.

The problem with widgets is, not all of them carry over well to the new design. I’m not talking about sidebars those stay the same for the most part but in my designs, I use widgets to display member only links/content, on home pages and landing pages. Most times these widgets are created to fit the design.

Thankfully, WordPress allows you to create your widgets ahead of time. Here’s what I did. Before loading the new theme, drag the widgets I’d need to use/create from the Available into the Inactive Widgets panel. Then, simply copy/paste your content, or configure your widgets inside the Inactive Widgets panel.

Next, load the new theme and pop in the widgets into the right places of your theme. This will shorten the time where your site looks out of whack.

In case you’re wondering why I didn’t simply clone my site, work on it then restored it to the live site – that won’t work in this case because there is a resource that is actively being downloaded every day. I’d lose my download stats between the time the site was cloned and the time it takes to create the new design.

So I’m definitely very happy WordPress supports the creation/storing of widgets you need to use or re-use in a safe spot.