A plugin I found useful is the Widget Wrangler. It may be the answer you are looking for. Furthermore, you can create multiple widgets and assign different widgets per page or just the three for the entire site. See what you think.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-wrangler/
Hi Mat,
You can use your footer as a sidebar, logically it will be called as a sidebar, but you can load it inside your footer.php
Thanks, I am calling the widgets from a file called footer-sidebar.php. The widgets load fine, but the all load in the first column. I would like them to be spread out over three columns on install.
Cascus,
Thanks for your reply, but this is something I would like to happen from a clean install.
Here is the code I used to acheive this. Just add the following inside each sidebar where you want to add default content.
<?php
if ( ! dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-5' ) ) {
the_widget( 'WP_Widget_Calendar' );
}
?>
Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10203413/how-to-add-default-widgets-to-a-custom-dynamic-sidebar