Sep
Horatio Alger Widget
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I recently finished up a project at Qorvis for Horatio Alger Association. Qorvis did a beautiful redesign of the website but as anyone who has ever built a website knows, it doesn’t matter if you have the most beautiful website in the world if no one ever sees it. Ensuring that a website is seen is no easy task and there are many different solutions to this. In this particular case we took the route of building a widget for Horatio Alger.
The Widget
This is a very simple widget has a feed reader that shows any updates to the Horatio Alger website. It can be placed on any website and many social networks such as facebook.
Why Widgets?
The value of widgets is the ability for them to spread. Any website or social network this widget is placed on will enable the users of that website to ‘grab’ the widget and use it on their own site as well. This ‘viral’ spread of a websites content can generate a huge amount of traffic back to the original site.
What Constitutes a Widget?
There is alot of debate on this subject and not alot of clear answers. These days everyone is trying to define what a ‘widget’ or a ‘gadget’ is. Basically a widget is a small modular piece of content that can be placed in many places on the web or desktop. Widgets should be useful in that they should have dynamic content or other useful functionality. In this particular case the dynamic content is a website’s feed. Widgets can also combine different sources of data into a mashup. Whatever the case may be it is imperative to have a useful purpose to entice users to use the functionality and drive traffic back to the originating website.
Along with purpose there should always be a business purpose and business measurements behind the widget (or any business endeavor for that matter). Analytics is a key feature to a widget. If you don’t know if the widget is being used on other websites or is being clicked on by users you cannot know for certain that the widget is doing what it was originally intended to do.
Conclusion
While widgets are certainly not the ‘be all end all’ solution to driving traffic to your website, they can be a powerful ally in establishing an internet presence.
Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Projects. 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.