It is becoming more and more popular to include a lot of different widgets on websites, especially blogs to make it look better.

For starters - “Widget” usually is some kind of image, providing statistics or adding interactivity to your site. In most cases it’s powered by java script located on the server of the widget provider. On my site you can see four examples - PayPerPost direct and EntreCard widgets in the gray sidebar, FeedBurner subscribers in the right sidebar and MyBlogLog Latest Visitors in the bottom area of the page.

I don’t see anything wrong with using widgets but some people are taking it to the extreme - they use each and every widget they can find no matter if serves any purpose…

The main drawback with using widgets, like I stated above, it’s hosted on the remote server of widget provider and in many cases - very busy servers. If some of those servers are busy or experience some kind of problems - your own site may freeze or take forever to load.

My advise - before adding any new widgets to your website or blog ask yourself a simple question: is it worth loosing visitors??? Yes this is correct - if your site takes more than 10-20 seconds to load at least half of potential visitors will hit “back” button!

The only reasons for having slow loading widget on your site - if it brings you money (PayPerPost widget in my case) or help you to promote your site (MyBlogLog and EntreCard widgets on my site). Some of widgets are not java-script based and powered by simple php code with link to a regular image. In this case if you like to use this widget - download the image and save it on your own server. This way at least image itself will load even if remote server is down…

I saw a lot of widgets that display your blog ratings in some directories, traffic exchanges and many other useless things. Many of those sites (widget owners) advertise their services as greatest sources of traffic as long as you have widget with a backlink to their site inserted on yours. This is a complete bull$**t!

The only time ranking numbers of your site matter - when you are trying to sell advertising space. For this occasion you can have all those things inserted on one page where you describe advertising options.

One more time: before inserting next cute widget on your site ask yourself one simple question (like Matty in “The girl next door”…) - does the juice worth the squeeze?

I just had to let this one out!

I recently joined EntreCard Viral marketing program (look on a little widget in the narrow sidebar). As any other traffic exchange program it’s pretty much useless in order to bring you quality targeted visitors, but can help a little bit to generate some initial traffic.

To find some relevant sites I looked over the list of categories with numbers of blogs submitted. No surprise there - by far the largest number of blogs is listed in category “Making Money Online”. I guess John Chow and Jeremy Shoemoney should watch out - new generation is coming!

So… I visited some of those websites in case I would need to chose where I would like to have my banner displayed. Sadly enough about 95% of those sites are worthless…

Just to give you a clue one of those so called “gurus” suggest to “…write quality content for 5 websites within 3 days…” Can I have some of that good $**t he is smoking???

Than I found this line that explains a lot: “…when author is not teaching how to make money online he is playing guitar…”

One more I repeat - when choosing a niche for the new website PLEASE choose something you are interested in and competent enough to talk about. Otherwise your website will look and you sound just like one of those thousands of gurus…

Today I found an interesting post on UK Webmaster forum about something new in the domain industry - City of Los Angeles decided to create it.s own top level domain extension .LA. As it turned out this is actually not so new according to Temi’s SEO Blog.
Will it become a new popular movement with many other extensions to follow?

The interesting part that all most popular names that could be in high demand were reserved and already offered for sale at the premium price anywhere from $1000 to $50,000 . For example “girls.la” or “star.la” are priced at the highest $50K while “kids.la” or “gifts.la” could be acquired for only $1K.

Personally I think these new TLD extensions would work for a local business and can actually be kind of useful to identify company as local. It may be even cute to have your name registered as a domain with local extension if you want to show off where you live…

For the website looking for global exposure this new local domain in my opinion will do no good…

When designing a layout for your website it is essential to check it in multiple browsers.

Few years back over 90% of web surfers were using Microsoft Internet Explorer but nowadays other browsers fast gaining share of the market. Most popular are Mozilla Fairfox and Opera.

Even Internet Explorer has released new version (IE7) which works much different from the preceding version (IE6).

Layout and styles configured to work fine in IE may appear all broken or not readable in other browsers. I can guarantee - no one will open another browser just to see your site, so you will loose potential customer.

Multiple browsers can be easily installed on your computer without any interference with exception of IE versions - you can have only one version running.

This is even more important if your site has anything to do with web design services. Recently I did some research on local web design companies just to check competition and found very interesting thing… Some of those companies are claiming to be in web design and development business for years and display tons of feedback from so-called happy customers. Amazingly many of their own sites appears to be very poorly styled and appear broken in Fairfox… Would you consider to hire one of those companies to develop your site? I don’t think so!

So… Take your time to make website multi browser compatible or hire someone to do it for you - you will appreciate it later.