Since the time Wordpress has introduced wigetized sidebars customizing WordPress powered blogs became much easier task. With huge amount of plugins and widgets available for free download webmasters can pick and choose what kind of info display on their’s blogs, where to place it on the pages and all that can be done without ever changing the source code or template files. All updates can be done directly from the blog admin panel after you’ve done small modification to your theme.

In the default (Kubrick) theme there is only one widgetized sidebar created and you can see it if you go to “widgets” option in the “Design” section of your WordPress admin panel. You can place unlimited amount of widgets there but the problem is - you have very little flexibility how these blocks will look on the front end. Appearance of all elements are controlled by the same styling options assigned to the ID=”sidebar”.

Here is a simple tutorial how you can create new widgetized zones (I call them “zones” since they do not have to be placed in the sidebar), place them anywhere on the page and have full control over the style of each widgetized zone. (more…)