John of TransformativeLifeCoaches.com asks

I am wanting to install an Aweber autoresponder Sign Up Box (for a Giveaway report and a series of autoresponder emails) on our site. 

I believe the best way to do that is to put the Sign Up box in Sidebar 2 which doesn’t appear to be activated on our TLCoaches site. 

I went  to Widgets on the WP control panel to drag the "text/HTML" widget onto Sidebar 2 but it wouldn’t drag nor do any other widgets. 
Can you tell me the best way to get the autoresponder box on every page of our site?

In reality, WordPress and the sidebars on the site were not broken.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the site as of the date of the question.

This particular site only has 1 sidebar programmed into the theme.  With Artisteer (as of Sept 2009) at most you can design themes with 2 sidebars.  You can add more than 2 sidebars to the themes after export but that is another topic for a different day.

In this case, with only 1 sidebar designed in the theme, when a user logs into WordPress, they can only activate/use/drag and drop widgets to the sidebar that actually is turned on an enabled within functions.php of the theme they have created.

Two sidebars do show up sometimes, but only 1 will work when your theme has just a single sidebar activated.

The Solution

In this case if John wants to utilize a second (new) sidebar, all he has to do, is open up his theme in Artisteer and make a 5 second change to his layout, adding a sidebar where he likes, and then export and upload the updated theme to his website.

Piece of cake!

UPDATE

If you read the comments below, you will learn that the original solution and trouble shooting didn’t quite fix this problem.  the solution was a little easier, but also more hidden.

To fix this, John learned that he needed to click on the screen options button at the top right hand corner of every wordpress admin screen.

Then

On WP widgets page, I went to screen options and hit “enable accessibility mode”-simple solution, just didn’t know it was there.

Resources:

• Greater Charlotte Area WordPress Meetup Group
• Blog Surfing Networks
• Comment Kahuna
• BlogCatalog

Below are some text transcripts that are very rough and intended primarily to help people find this video via search.

Everybody this is Brett Bumeter, and I am coming to you from Lake Wylie, North Carolina. This is a down the River comics covers is done and I live in Belmont now going to just cross that river or lake from Charlotte North Carolina today. We’re going to be talking about networking your blog while building traffic in general. On the topic that were going to be covering today is a relevant. A relatively fundamental topic and logging and it involves. What I would call of some Web one .oh methodology. Today we have a lot of social media networks out there that help people learn how to network their blog. Promote what they’re doing, and one of the good things, but there was a time before social media hit for Web two .oh functionality. It wing bloggers just wrote articles, and they had other ways of networking with each other in some of those ways still exist for people starting out in blogging. It can actually be relatively useful to try some of those out partly understand where we’ve come from production where we’re going, and partly just to see what’s happening up there on the web because there’s a lot of older bloggers are people that have been blogging for a long time that haven’t all embrace the new social media tools that are out there some great writers that are good writers but not good networkers. And there’s some people out there that are great writers that don’t know how to use of the social media tools that exist. So I’m not knocking that one way or another, but I do want to show you some things that people used to use Angelo’s things you can still use today to good advantage. So I’m just kind of have to step back of my name is Brett Bumeter. And I blog or work from an office here on the lake and its actually a WiFi fishing dock, and we offer lab sessions where people can come in and sit down with me. And we can help teach you how to write a blog builder blog install a blog. Even design your own WordPress theme with a number of things with WordPress from web design to blog management to content management systems, and I also run a local WordPress meet a group. So one of the things that we found is that there were a lot of people coming to our meet ups that were interested in WordPress or blogging or number of related topics, but they were missing some fundamental information so we so some of these lab on the lake session where people come and give people a time and receive some training or mentoring or whatever it is they needed and I setting unlike relaxin environment can move on from there. So that’s overdoing today, kicked things off by taking a look at some of the basics of blog network. Now, in general, take a half step back of blog. Often times. It’s like a conversation, some people like to confuse blogging with a journalism and blogging the tool it can be used for journalism, but it doesn’t have to be. I can just be a one to many conversation from a person that writes the blog article to everyone that reads it in some cases those readers will even respond and comment back on talking to the blogger and that could spiral into a longer conversation. So if we think of a blog is a conversation, networking is a natural outcome of that conversation because people will need to find other people to talk to to have that conversation have to talk to somebody otherwise know is that conversation. So there are some tools that were developed some years back that help bloggers essentially list their blogs within a network and it enabled other bloggers as well as people enjoyed reading those blogs to randomly go through. View the blogs see the most recent articles, leave comments a number of that sort I go through. Couple those tools and how they work their were some networks as well that not only did that but they actually offered something that I might call a marketing service and that they were helping those bloggers get more traffic, and I’m not going to cover really the ethics of how that might be good bad or otherwise. But you should be aware that some of these networks were used for that purpose and still
are today. The thing about that type of situation is there are times when that traffic can look spammy or it can look particularly the cheaper false to advertisers that might want to advertise on your site. So if you’re actually looking to build quality traffic people that are really interested in what you are writing people that are really interested in what you’re talking about and from your advertisers perspective people that are actually real people that might be interested in the products they advertise. Then, some of these networks that we might point out are probably not be for you. I’m not trying to encourage spam by a long shot, but I do want to show you the networks and help you understand the good the bad and everything in between, so you’ll understand the tools and know-how to use them while because there are couple of them can be used to very good advantage. And you can even bathe and actually deserves to help clean out some of the spammers and the blogosphere is going to. So let’s take a look at a couple of the blog surfing networks is what I liked: some people call them blog surfing exchanges were blog exchanges and I’m going to come into my site as often media. And I went to go to the intermediate-range section on the blog surfing networks. Take a look at this page on this page is to a long list of the ways that did this and many of them have gone out of business. Even some relatively large ones, but there’s still a handful route I’ve actually got three listed here by do-gooders. Probably a dozen more, but there’s three different ones here, one of them is called blog explosion, and one of them is called click pirates and one of them is called blogsoldiers now from their names alone, you might be able to infer couple different things. What may or may not be apparent is that blog explosion is probably one of the least spammy blog surfing exchanges out there. There was a time when they were actually very integral in shielding and cleaning out some of the spam on the blogosphere. They don’t wear that hat as much these days, partly due to the explosion of social media that they do help in a number different situations to help bloggers. See what other types of blogs are out there screen out what is normally decent content on those blogs and help bloggers network is radically them first. So I’m going to, click here and move over to blog explosion. Now, I’m not going to walk through the process of establishing an account with blog explosion through this tutorial on to establish an account of blog explosion basis of user profile. You list your blog and some information about your blog and someone from blog explosion will eventually review your site confirm that it’s a real blog and not pornography or spam or something like that. And then they will list you in the directory now. Blog explosion chose instead to the top. You can see that they have approximately 92,000 blogs in their directory, and of those those are people who submitted fifteen thousand have been reviewed. So not everybody that Smits gets in. That’s a good thing because there’s a lot of garbage blogs out there. Now they have a blogs visited number of thirty-five million that means blogs on their list here have been viewed thirty-five million times the bed. Submitted reviewed excepted and visited by people that use the blog explosion service. So that’s quite a bit of visitors, but the service is also the proper number of years. The site is relatively simple to navigate going to login here remember my password. That would definitely

This like many of our topics will be covered several times.  Blog Monetization is definitely not something that can be covered in a single day, let alone a single lab.  Many people are looking for ways to earn extra money, raise revenue to market their companies more, or even start their own business.  We will help people get started with the process of making money with a blog (a blog is required to follow along with this lab in person or on our live show at Mogulus.com/wificove ).

Then on Thursday(5/21 2 pm est) we are going to cover the topic of building traffic through networking.  [Meetup RSVP link]

Again this is a very deep topic and one we will revisit many times in the future, but you can tune into either lab at 2 PM est or if you are in the Charlotte area, RSVP through our Meetup group (cost $5 to attend) and spend an afternoon on the lake learning some great web skills that will make you money.

We are following up on our first Lab on the Lake last week, which covered WordPress Installation, WordPress Configuration, & WordPress Theme design with our favorite WordPress Theme Generator-Artisteer.  The video from this event (our first live broadcast) didn’t take to well, but we got the bugs worked out the next night when we held our weekly WordPress Meetup in Charlotte and do expect this weeks events to go off without a hitch.

Charlotte May WordPress Meetup Fav Plugin/Setups/Configurations (SEO Focus)

Cost: $5.00

Meetup Membership: Required

Membership: Free

Cost: $5.00

Meetup Membership: Required

Membership: Free