Comment on WordPress Widgets Tutorial by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Widget Sounds like you are new to WordPress and haven’t played around with widgets yet. No need to make any code changes to achieve what you want, if you have got modified files online suggest you upload the original files as you might have removed important code for achieving what I describe below.

The sidebars which in the layout you are using are at the bottom of the content rather than the side are called widget areas.

Under your Dashboard go to Appearance >> Widgets where you will find a big list of widget areas on the right and a lot of widgets on the left, each widget area is a different location of the theme and can hold content via the widgets on the left. The widgets hold/generate the content.

Stallion includes two default widget areas, Left and Right sidebars so when Stallion is first installed you don’t find a blank sidebar that looks like the site is broken. As you are using an older version of Stallion (7.0) you didn’t get the notice to go to Appearance >> Widgets, in Stallion 7.1+ when Stallion is first installed there’s a block of text on each sidebar explaining some of this so a new users knows how to set their widgets and remove the default widgets. You are also missing out on some new features not upgrading.

Anyway, if you want no sidebars at all drag and drop a Text Widget into the right sidebar widget area, add nothing to it, do the same to the left sidebar. This will override the Stallion default widgets (when the first widgets added the default widgets are removed) and leave your site with empty sidebars.

This is generally not a good idea for the vast majority of sites, all depends on the size of the site, layout and what it’s aim. If it’s going to remain a small site (not many pages) you can run with no sidebars/widgets, if you built a site with 50+ pages you really need widgets to add links through the site so search engines index them all.

Looks like you’ve only add Static Pages currently which are all by default being added to the top menu. If you plan to add more static Pages that area will run out of space quickly, recommend the following.

Appearance >> Menus

On the right create a new custom menu, name it topnav in the Menu name box.

Add the most important pages to this menu, save it, on the left under Theme Locations select topnav for the Primary Navigation.

This will add your important links on the top as they are now minus not so important links. When you create new Static Pages that are important add them to the menu.

Create another menu, call it footerlinks and add other links that aren’t as important to it. Add this menu to the Theme Locations Footer Links, anything added there will be shown in the footer.

The above will give you more freedom with adding Static Pages, if you look at the top menu on this site you can see it’s dropdown as well, this is part of the system described above and allows you to add a lot of links without it filling the top of your site with links.

Bit of SEO advice as well, a page like which appears to be the soundtrack to a film should be named something like

1999 Film Soundtrack

This will tell search engines what the page is about much better than a title like Music.

If you make this change to all your pages without changing the custom menus described above you’ll find your top navigation links will have a lot of text and it will spill over, if you want to keep the links clean by adding the custom menu you can edit the links text on the menu page and change them to Music or Soundtrack.

David