Wordpress Tip: Adding Space in Your Sidebar

What’s the golden rule of Web 2.0? WHITE SPACE! Gone are the days of flashing banners and density of text. Here come the days of freedom and wide-open spaces. And that brings me to today’s topic.

When I first starting working in Wordpress, I had a hard time figuring out how to space my sidebar correctly. Everything seemed squished together, but I couldn’t figure out how to create space between widgets.

Over time, I have figured out how to create such space in more technical and un-user-friendly ways, but we will save such discussions for another day. For now, I’m going to give you this quick work-around that should help even the newest newbie get some much needed white space in his or her  sidebar.

Anyone familiar with the newest versions of WordPress should also be familar with the “widgets” section of the administration page. It’s under “appearance,” and it is here that you can move and configure all your widgets.

Included among these are the highly-manipulable and extremely flexible “Text” widgets. These will allow you to put any text you like into your sidebar(s). But, conveniently enough, they will also allow you to insert HTML code. And thus we come to our lesson for the day.

If you want to make space between two widgets, just insert a text box. In the text box, type in the html for soft return, “< br / >
“, or for hard return, “< hr / >“.  NOTE: as a commenter gently pointed out in response to the first draft of this post, you’ll want to remove the spaces between the greater-than and less-than brackets around “br” and “hr.” You’ll also want to remove the quotation marks. I had to write it this way so my own post wouldn’t be affected by the code!

The soft  return will give you an empty line, and the hard return will give you a straight horizontal line. You can add as many as you like in your site.

Happy navigating.

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Paco