The Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online mall with its boutiques filled with thousands of useful, off-the-rack accessories of every description and utility. In the age of openness, it's suddenly very fashionable and sexy to accessorize Web sites with widgets: small applications that plug into bigger ones. There are a lot of really fun and innovative widgets out there that can add functionality and effective calls to action.
The formal definition of a Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate html-based Web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.
A few important questions to ask before your consider adding a widget to your blog or Web site.
- Does your Web site or blog publish excellent content on a regular basis?
- Do you ask good questions that lead to conversations online?
- Do you have strategies for encouraging those conversations and linking them to your content?
- Do you write blog posts that inspire lots of comments?
- Do you employ a social networking or online outreach strategy that engages your regular readers and enables new readers to discover you?
Although using widgets is not yet a standard practice on nonprofit blogs and Web sites, many organizations are experimenting and learning. They have identified the benefits of widgets:
- Easy to use, you don't need technical skills
- Can help you extend or enhance the conversation on your blog
- Can help you "listen" by gathering feedback and other information from your blog readers
- Can help you easily link to other sites, content, or individuals
- Can help make your blog more "findable"
- They are lots of fun
Before you go hog wild and install every widget known to mankind, consider the following:
- If most of your readers are following you via blog readers, they might not "pop" out of their reader to visit your browser.
- The more widgets you add to your blog or Web site, the longer it could take to load your site. Be sure to place your flash widgets at the top of page, and try to keep it to no more than three or four on a page.
- Many blogs end up being positioned higher in search engine searches, so there must be some blogs that are being discovered via the browser and not a reader. So, perhaps widgets should be designed to reach first-timers or new readers. Consider them as a strategy for point of entry. You need to know from where your audience is coming to your blog.
- Consider your audience when you select a particular widget. If you're a podcaster and your audience is likely to have a microphone installed on their computer, then voice message widgets might make sense.
- The use of widget must be linked to the topic, content, or purpose of your blog or Web site, such as linking a poll to a post on the topic.
- Some widgets offer more control over the look and feel if you need to use particular color schemes. Not all widgets are ugly.
- Be sure to test these widgets to make sure they are installed and work.
Source: http://www.nptimes.com/technobuzz/TB200706_1.html