WEB CONTENT PROFESSIONALS

Your Ad Here


Monday, December 11, 2006

Are Widgets Traffic Midgets?

Any savvy web designer, developer or marketing person can tell you that Widgets [article from ISEDB and interview with Lawrence Coburn] are increasingly becoming popular as a another tool to drive traffic, and hopefully conversions, to your web site.

Widgets have also allowed Internet and My Space users the ability to offer dynamic to their readers like never before. The one big problem with widgets are the security alerts they often cause in IE, and the fact that some are embedded into web pages, forcing visitors to either listen their musical choices or involuntarily get bombarded with widgets.

Widgets can also be annoying and actually cause people to leave a web site, especially embedded song and other audio files that automatically, and unexpectedly, blast through your speakers. Even trying to disable this in IE and Firefox does not appear to work. [If you know how to fix this, please leave a message in the Comments link below or email us at sunmoonrain@gmail.com.]

The rise in popularity of widgets owes it's fame in large part to the wild success of My Space. For a couple of years now, members have place 'widgets' - like audio players and video streams - on their pages to share music and other media and non-media files with friends easily and for free.

But for big business, widgets are yet another little way to build traffic. The prediction is that they will leap in popularity as creative marketing professionals, developers, business reps and savvy web writers find effective ways to incorporate them into their web platforms.

In the past few years, My Space has really changed the way that companies build and promote web sites. Nowadays, there are more companies and other online entities that embrace the so-called 'social networking' (rather than hording all content control for themselves), find that not staying ahead of the trends and emerging technologies in web content creation, delivery, promotion and marketing is a recipe for failure, and at the least, loss of new visitor attraction, branding and conversions.

For an overview of widgets, check out Wikipedia at and a must-read interview with Lawrence Coburn, "the father of widgets", from Internet Search Engine Database. Who actually 'invented' the widget to use on computers and the web is still debated.


Labels: , , , , , , , ,



Best Web Stuff

Web Popular Video of the Day
Hawking Fulfills Dream

Web Popular Video of the Day
Bush Gets Jiggy

Web Popular Video of the Day
Pizza Throwing Fan

Must See Videos
Deer Invade Rest Home

astronauts in outer space, marathon in space, international space station
Out of this World!

Web Popular Video of the Day
Racist Idiot of the Week

Must See Videos
8 Year Old Breast Feeds


This Isn't Darts Man!


Boy Welcomes Dad Home