How to Create 3 Columns Widgetized Footer for Your Blog?

Thinking of adding a three-column widgetized footer to your blog while using Headway theme, here is a method suggested by Paul Coughlin in his blog.


Basically there are few steps involved.
1. In the wordpress dashboard under “Headway 2.0.7”, click on “Easy Hook”.
2. Look for “footer open”, copy the following code and paste the code into it.

<div id="footer-widgets" class="clearfix"/>
<?php
 if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Footer-Widgets') ) echo '<p align="center"/>You can put a bunch of widgets here</p/>';
?/>
<div style="clear:both;"/></div>
</div> 

3. Then copy the following code and paste it into the “custom_functions.php” file.

if (function_exists('register_sidebar'))
register_sidebar(array('name' =/> 'Footer-Widgets','before_widget' =/> '<div class="footer-item"/>','after_widget' =/> '</div/>','before_title' =/> '<h2/>','after_title' =/> '</h2>',)); 

4. You can add the above code directly using “Appearance > Editor” at the wordpress dashboard.
5. If you encounter error after adding the code then try the below method.
6. Download the “custom_functions.php” file to your hard disk using FTP program.
    (If you do not have a copy of FTP program, you can download a free one from FileZilla).
7. The file is found at “/public_html/wp-content/themes/headway-208/custom”.
8. Once downloaded, add the code directly into “custom_functions.php” file. Add it at the end of the file.
9. Upload the file back to your theme folder.
10. Now go to "Appearance > Widget", you can see a “Footer-Widgets” on the right hand side.
11. Drag the widgets you want them to appear at the footer to the inside of “Footer-Widgets” box.
12. Once you are done, you should able to see the widgets appear at your blog footer.

There could have other methods of creating three-columns widgetized footer but this has been one of the popular one so far.