Unfocus » Tutorials » Webular Widgetry Part One: Planning Your Web Widget

Webular Widgetry Part One: Planning Your Web Widget

It’s hard to not noticed the numerous third-party advertisements, badges and widgets floating around on the web, most notably when they cause your favorite site – or even your own site – to tack on a few extra seconds of loading time. As a savvy webmaster, there are a few things you can do to mitigate slow-loading widgets, but that’s another article entirely. This tutorial will show you how to create your own simple widget engine that will let publishers design their own badge and host it on their site through an iFrame, much like Google Adsense and Amazon’s nifty widget stuffs.

It may seem like a huge task, but when broken down it’s actually just four major steps: Planning, Developing, Maintaining and Marketing. Today’s tutorial will deal with the first step, which is to plan out the purpose of your widget, and defining a clear reason for other webmasters to add it to their site.

The Purpose of Your Widget
This question may seem pretty limitless, but with a clear answer the rest of the planning phase will be a breeze. What should your widget do? Would you like to offer webmasters the option of showing your RSS feeds on their site, or perhaps let them advertise the number of referrers they send through a shiny badge graphic? What about letting them showcase their status on your site by generating a graphic with their forum posts count and avatar? The coding part is simple, and in fact a simple $25 freelance job could take care of most of the scripting that a widget back and front end would need done. An article I’m planning for a later date will touch on the various types of widgets, and best practices on how to use them on your site.

Configuration Options
Should a webmaster or publisher be allowed to configure your widget at all? Consider the user experience and try to keep the options down to a minimum, while allowing all the basics such as CSS colors and fonts that make the widget blend in with different types of pages.

Preparing Your Widget for Viral Popularity
Nothing guarantees success other than hard work and some luck, but one thing to keep in mind are the amount of server resources you’d need to have if your widget would to be installed on a few thousand websites due to word of mouth advertising. If you’re on a budget, you might be able to host everything on a VPS or cheap dedicated server, and higher-end widgets tend to scale well in cloud and cluster based environments like Amazon’s Web Services. If your widget will host static content, you can store any non-real-time content, such as images, on a content delivery network. Prices for those vary widely, and research is needed to choose the best one. Consider how popular your widget may become, and build your resources accordingly by choosing a web server and CDN.

In closing for step one of this four part series, it usually saves you time, money and frustration to plan your project out the best you can before actually developing it. Apply the steps and suggestions above and read part two when you’re ready.

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