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?

Tags: Webdesign, Website, Website Development, Widgets

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 11:47 pm in category CSS and Web Design, Internet, Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.