One of the loudest yells I get at the moment, when a client and I are looking at a WordPress install is ‘what the heck is a sidebar and why is it important anyway’ - closely followed by ‘why isn’t this widget WORKING!’

A sidebar is a section of your blog at the left/right/bottom of your blog that lets you put links, ‘widgets’ and more into it.  If a blog were a house, the  sidebars would be the walls.  They shouldn’t change much, and should contain navigational links to your posts, archives, recent comments and anything else you think people should see when visiting your blog.  They shouldn’t take the place of the content.

WordPress was developed to allow people to use a ‘drag and drop’ style of arranging thier sidebar - with text boxes for widget support.  To find your sidebar widgets, you need to log into your WordPress install and then find the Design (or THEME in pre 2.5 installs) and then look for widgets.
You might get an error message that says widgets aren’t enabled - or you might not see the ‘widget’ option at all - if that’s the case, check your plugins folder first, and make sure your sidebar widgets are enabled, and up to date.  If you can see they are active, you may have to check your theme - or contact someone that can.  Widgetising the sidebar isn’t complicated, but it can be fairly fiddly, so it’s always better to find a tutorial, or a professional that will do it for you.

We widgetise themes for $10 per theme - just contact us through our contact form.

Sidebar widget instruction and theme support (for themes that haven’t been wigetised (increasingly rare) - can be found at Automattic Widgets.