Before we take a look at the best widgets and add-on’s for your website, let’s discuss what a widget is. Widgets are usually interactive and contain third party content. They can be information portals to enhance your content or they can be fun and entertaining. We use the term widget but we really mean any kind of add-on (extra content) for your website. We’ll list our top five picks and give some analysis as well. Tell us what you think.
1. Twitter
A twitter display widget enhances your website with fresh information. Here you can display your most recent tweets which will give your visitors a way of keeping up to date. If you don’t know what twitter is; it is a social networking site of sorts. It uses short “tweets” of up to 140 characters to display short messages. You can put short URLs in theses tweets as well (links to your site). To use twitter you must first sign-up with them and you should keep tweeting about every little update on your site. To go even further you may want to follow people or businesses on twitter; this way their tweets will show up on your widget to make you site even fresher. Depending on what you use to run your website (pure code HTML or CMS), there may be special third party created widgets, but the official twitter widget is found on twitter.com.
2. Page Peel
A page peel widget is the best line of code to have if you want to highlight content, either yours or an advertisement. Sometimes we have a page peel banner in the top right corner of BeginnerWebs.com. This widget is extremely eye-catching and is sure to get visitors to take a peek. It works usually through flash but sometime jquery(an advanced form of JavaScript). You usually hover over it with your mouse and it will peel away the page revealing whatever you want to place there. As you can imagine this is the perfect place for an ad banner. This type of coding can get complicated so it is a lot easier if you are using CMS (a Content Management System) like WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal. If you aren’t, then you should be comfortable using html and JavaScript code. If you are using CMS, then there are plenty of free add-ons for you to acquire. As an example for WordPress users, we’ve picked out a top rated one. Check it out here.
3. Headline News
A news widget is the most popular for third party content. A news widget is an information portal that brings in outside content to freshen up your site. It gives your visitors the feeling that your site is up to speed with the rest of the world. Most news widgets are updated all the time even if you don’t update your WebPages. You can choose widgets that are news tickers or conventional sidebar modules. You should pick a news source that displays news from the same category of interest that your website focuses on. You can display funny news, weird news, serious news, upcoming events (updates from a calendar), and many others. For the number three spot we’ve decided to pick the RSS News Widget from Feedzilla. There, you can pick from hundreds of news feeds to display on your widget. You can customize it to fit your website’s colors and format. We will caution you however, that there are sometimes included ads within the widget (which don’t interfere with your site at all). Once you’ve finished customizing the widget you’ll get a simple code to place anywhere you want on your pages. As with all the widgets we choose, it’s free!
4. Weather Display
Weather widgets can be very useful to those who need them. Weather display widgets can be interactive and as you guessed, display the weather. However, you must be careful in your decision because if the widget doesn’t fit in with the subject matter of your site, then it will just look like filler. You don’t want unnecessary junk clogging up you sidebar. But if your site could use weather information, then there are various widgets to choose from. A simple Google search for “Weather Widgets” will bring up thousands of choices. Our pick is AccuWeather.com’s version. Just customize and paste your code.
5. Floating Toolbar
A floating toolbar is usually a flash module that can rest at the bottom of the browser window or anywhere else on the page. The most popular use for these is social bookmarking links. Because it floats, a toolbar is always visible to the visitor (similar to a toolbar in your internet browser). Some of the buttons you could include are “add to favorites”, search, tweet, digg, facebook, and a variety of others. We will warn you however, that some toolbars can interfere with page content and can annoy visitors. Chances are that your website subject is not entirely unique and that annoyed visitors will simply back-out and search for another site. As we’ve discussed previously, less is more.
For our number five pick, we’ve chosen something for Joomla! users. The AddThis Sharebar utilizes social bookmarking in a sleek design. If you don’t use Joomla! you can still get the Sharebar by going to AddThis.com.
