- Image by Somewhat Frank via Flickr
You are building a brand new website and you’ve decided to add some widgets. These applications will allow you to provide information such as current, local weather conditions to your site. This is possible because a weather widget accesses information from a third-party weather service and presents it on your website. Early web widgets were page hit counters and rotating banner advertising.
Currently, widgets use technology that includes HTML, Flash, and JavaScript. There are sites such as Widgetbox and SnackTools that will allow you to create your own widgets — and you don’t even have to know code to do it.
Widgets are generally used by users to augment their experiences on the web. The popularity of widgets has grown in situations where social media users can add these apps to profiles and blogs. Widgets can be thought of as adding utilitarian purposes much like that of iPhone apps.
Widgets are often used to present sponsored content. This sponsorship can actually pay for the development of the widget. For example, a user may install a widget that presents daily sports scores and the sports news site that is providing the information gains awareness among the users.
If search engine optimization is important to your site, you might want to reconsider the inclusion of widgets. Much of the content created for widgets occurs in Flash or JavaScript and as such, this content cannot be seen by search engines.
On the not-so-positive side, widgets can be created for malicious purposes. One such example is the Secret Crush widget that appeared on Facebook. Users were lured into installing not only the widget, but Zango adware that was considered an unwanted application which gathered advertising information from users.
There are both pros and cons for widgets, so you’ll need to decide if yours! site needs widgets.
