Website widgets

Making website widgets is a great way of getting people to discover and use your product or service.

My favourite widget website is called Widgetbox and it’s one of these wonderful, free, web 2.0 style websites which does pretty complicated stuff very easily and intuitively.

With Widgetbox, you can create your own widget or use someone else’s widget.

The widgets you create are automatically made available on the site, so it also becomes a way of getting your site ‘out there’ and bring it to the attention of a new audience.

The essential part of this service though is that you can add your widget to your blog, your social networking profile or your website, and there's an extensive range of options available:

# Facebook # Wordpress # MySpace # Blogger # Typepad # LiveJournal

# Tagged # Multiply # Blogger Post # iGoogle # Netvibes # Freewebs

# Pageflakes # Piczo # Ning # Confluence

Creating your own website widgets

Here's how a widget for my web-work-at-home.com website looks:

Notice the ‘Get Widget’ tab at the bottom … it’s really easy for other people to spot your widget then grab it for themselves and add it to their own site.

So how do make a quick widget to start marketing your new website widgets?

Websites widgets if you have a website or blog already

Note: If you don't have a website already, look at this page for examples of how you use widgets in many social networking sites.

Step 1: Click on Make a widget

Step 2: Click on Blog/Feed

Step 3: Cut and paste your website RSS feed into the Blog/Feed URL box as shown below.

Note that you need to locate the XML feed of your website or blog which will look something like this:

http://www.your-website.com/your-website-id.xml

Step 4: Click on Continue and Widgetbox will process your widget.

Step 5: Customise your Look and Feel ... that means colour, theme, width and height, style and banner image.

Note the preview you get of your widget on the right hand side of the page.

Step 6: Next you need to edit your widget details.

Give it a name, make sure it's Listed or else nobody else will be able to see it, describe it and enter some suitable keywords to make sure that your website widget is found when web users do a search for a particular topic.

Add a thumbnail image if you have one (I just use a small version of my website banner), then click on the Save Blidget button.

Step 7: Finally comes the 'code' bit ... where you cut and paste the code for your chosen application, whether it be Facebook, My Space, Blogger or one of the alternatives.

Once you've inserted the code from your website widget, it will appear just like my working example further up the page.

It's a totally free option (though you can pay for extras!) and it's a great way of distributing you site content and getting it 'out there' without having to shell out for marketing fees.

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