Thrudigital

People often don’t realise that a domain name is just one component of a website, and put too much effort into finding the perfect domain name, often at the expense of content. There are basically two ways to acquire a domain: it’s either available or it’s for sale. In the first case it’s very simple: you just have to find the desired name and register it (personally, I use GoDaddy). If not, you may be able to buy the domain directly, or you may have to enter an auction. Unless you are already earning money from your website (and you just want to change the domain), or unless you know that you’ll earn money from the domain you’re about to buy, buying domains is not generally recommended. Otherwise, I recommend you register a new domain name, instead of spending thousands of dollars to acquire one. So let’s quickly look at common mistakes people make…

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If .com is already taken, you can always try .net or .org This is usual for many domain names, as it’s nearly impossible to find one-word domains which are still available. Believe it or not, even words such as ordinarily.com (.net, .org) and customary.com (.net, .org) are already registered. Sometimes you can strike lucky and find less common one-word domains that are still available. As you can see, this site’s domain name is web-developers.net, because web-developers.com was unavailable when the site was being built. The website used to be thrudigital.com, but for SEO purposes we changed to web-developers.net. As you can see, the current domain name is more SEO-friendly, as it contains two very important keywords for our business.

You don’t have to own business.com to profit! It’s possible to do your business with any domain name (assuming the length and TLD are reasonable). Just avoid names like forstupids.com (.net/.org) because your visitors won’t feel comfortable when they see such a name in the address bar.

Hyphenation is not bad! I always wonder why many SEO experts say that a hyphen in the domain name is a bad idea.  During the last 30 days, I was able to attract more than 100,000 unique visitors to aqua-fish.net. Nowadays it’s very difficult to find a domain like “word1word2”, so why not buy “word1-word2”? Do you know why people often try to persuade you that a domain with hyphen is bad? Usually, because they own “word1word2” domains, and they’re trying to sell them on. They call such domains “premium domains”.

Personally, I like buying “word1word2” domains, but that’s just my hobby. I own about 30 domain names, and some of them would be suitable for this web-developers.net domain. For example, “ukwebdevelopers.org”, “londonwebdesigners.org”, or “webdeveloperslondon.org”. All three would be a good substitution for web-developers.net, but why change a domain when the current name is ranked well for many important phrases?

Long domain names may be bad, but they can be good too! Experts say that it’s hard to remember long domain names, and they’re right. But you can still achieve top rankings in Google with a long domain name. Right now, I see web-design-directory-uk.co.uk ranked 2nd for the “uk web design” phrase in google.com. So you can see, more hyphens, more words, and still perfect rankings!

In my opinion I wouldn’t buy such long domain names, but they can be just as successful.

Don’t think that someone is going to buy your new domain for thousands of dollars! People read “get rich fast” stories and think that some company will pay them virtually unlimited amounts for domain names. It’s actually very hard to sell a domain. So before you spend hundreds on buying domains, make sure that you have a plan for what to do next.

Don’t buy domains with typos! There are numerous articles on the internet talking about how ‘cool’ domains with typos are. They’re not. Firstly, people usually type correct domain name into the address bar. Secondly, typos are bad for SEO purposes. Thirdly, it’s hard to remember these domains. If a returning visitor wants to return without a bookmark, he/she may be frustrated by finding the “correct misspelling” to find your website.

Imagine this situation… IBM would buy YBM.com instead of IBM.com. It doesn’t make any sense and it didn’t make any sense to IBM too.

Numbers are OK! Of course, this applies to “natural” numbers such as 123, or a combination of numbers and letters such as “1st”, “2nd” or so. Domains like 568912.com are worthless unless the “568912″ is your company’s name. Sometimes a substitution works too. For example, business2customer.net, org can be good domain names.

Think about content Don’t buy ukcellphones.net if your website is going to offer content related to UFOs. I personally think that each domain should accurately reflect the website’s content. Here is a good example: solodvds.com is a website about aquarium fish (I found it because it’s a competitor to aqua-fish.net). But the name solodvds.com suggests it’s a DVD-related website. This causes two main problems: first, in terms of SEO it’s very bad because the domain doesn’t contain any important words. So if you’re going to link to this website, you have to use solodvds instead of a fish/aquarium related word. Secondly, if you’re an ordinary visitor, would you expect solodvds.com to offer fish-related articles?

Dedicated servers are good, but usually expensive. At least it’s customer who says what is expensive and what is cheap. If your web business generated $100 per month, then you can forget about dedicated server. Even a very cheap solution (which is not recommended, see this article) could bring no good at all. On the other hand, earning $10000/month allows you to buy virtually any dedicated server no matter if it’s managed or unmanaged, cheap or expensive, Windows or Linux. In the first part let’s talk about dedicated servers and the second part mentions a few facts about virtual dedicated servers.

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What is cheaper and why; Managed or Unmanaged dedicated server?
As with every hosting service, you pay more dollars for a managed hosting than for an unmanaged. But to be honest, you MUST ask yourself if it’s worth spending money on managed server or not. If you need only initial set-up and if you can do the rest, then why to spend hundreds of dollars each month? In many cases “the rest” means copying files and moving databases, eventually changing permissions of a few files/directories. I personally think that paying money for a few hours or work each month is not worth it if you CAN do the same thing too. Here are the reasons:

1) If you’re buying a managed dedicated server, where is your website right now? Is it already running on some shared hosting which doesn’t fit your requirements any longer? In such a case, why do you need a managed server? In my opinion, everything should work fine after move.

Secondly, isn’t your web application running yet as a website? Then where is it now? I suppose it can be installed on some local server at your firm or at home. But, think about it; It is running and you KNOW the configuration, you know which packages are installed on your server. So if you were able to install these things on your local server, why can’t you do the same on another server?

Thirdly, if you’re a total greenhorn and there is someone who created your web application (since it doesn’t have to be a website necessarily), then better ask that person to move your website to a new dedicated server.

2) You should know better what is necessary to run your website properly than any other person. This is nothing personal against people who work as assistance teams for managed dedicated server plans, but you’re the one who knows all things. Even if your IT department created the application, they MUST know all details about the application. It is impossible that someone is a PHP programmer who doesn’t know anything about how to configure APACHE server or how to restart and configure MySQL. One doesn’t have to know everything, however even a small knowledge is a must. So once again; Why pay someone if there is already a team (or a guy, or it’s yourself) that can do the thing too. In addition, you may be paying these people already.

3) What is managed dedicated hosting in fact? Actually, it means these things: Someone from the hosting company is responsible for monitoring and patching services in your server. Bear in mind that these services are programs running on your server, they’re not services running within your web application. Imagine that your server needs regular restarts of httpd (APACHE), so someone will restart it from time to time. But you should ask yourself, why is it necessary to restart some service? Servers should be stable and they should offer 100% system uptime for duration of 1 or 2 years, eventually more! Also, if your server needs security updates, then it might mean that something is wrong with it. For example, picture this… Your server runs without a software and hardware firewall (very extreme case) and someone breaks through. But… Isn’t it normal to buy a secured server? In my opinion, it is. Sometimes cheap dedicated servers may come with old operating systems, outdated security patches and so on. Explained in a simple way: You have a 6-7 years old server, but you still want to make money from it. So you place an offer saying $30/month. Someone not skilled enough will buy it. But after a few days this and that goes wrong, no-one is happy. The customer feels upset, the seller lost the customer and probably receives bad review if that customer knows where to leave such reviews.

So basically, if you’re buying a newly configured and properly installed dedicated server, you shouldn’t have a need to monitor services or to install patches. After 8-10 months it can be different, however after 8-10 months you CAN buy a new dedicated server! So once again you will have latest versions of software and maybe hardware will be better too. And if you know how to install/upgrade applications on your server, then you don’t have to worry at all.

4) Linux dedicated server is usually CHEAPER than Windows dedicated server. Why? Just because Windows is not free. But in this case, I’d like to mention a few facts about Linux vs. Windows. Linux systems are: More reliable, Faster (if configured properly), Safer, Virus-free, It is possible to install many free packages there (unlike Windows where majority of packages are paid). So do not argue that Windows is better because you don’t know Linux. Nearly all websites need only PHP and MySQL and these two things can work on Linux as well as on Windows. But, Linux is cheaper!

Of course, if your web application was created for Windows servers only, then there is no way but choosing Windows dedicated server. To give you a comparison, on GoDaddy the same plan costs from $12.99 to $19.99 more if you choose Windows instead of Linux. Only Red Hat Enterprise (4 or 5) is more expensive than Windows. But you can have CentOS or Red Hat Fedora too, and they’re cheaper than Windows.

5) Hardware firewall causes the price go higher. The same applies to RAM, HDD, Bandwidth, SSL certificate, Control panel, Database server (MS SQL costs much more than MySQL! – MS SQL is for Windows, although MySQL can be on Windows too), Backups and other options. Some providers offer you unlimited traffic with a 10Mb link, some will offer you unlimited traffic with a 100Mb link, but usually this is not very important for ordinary websites (see this article for details about traffic).

Nowadays the lowest prices of dedicated hosting can be somewhere at $100/month. Is it cheap? Yes, it is. I don’t recommend you buying dedicated servers for $30 or $40 per month. Such prices say that something may be wrong with such hostings.

Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting
These are cheaper than dedicated servers, but they can be the gold middle way for many webmasters. If you’re earning about $500/month or $1000/month, then spending more than $100/month on webhosting can slower further investments into your web business. There is nothing special to mention but:

1) Again, Linux are cheaper than Windows (licences, MS SQL),
2) Virtual dedicated servers give you a dedicated IP address which is good for SEO purposes,
3) System uptime doesn’t achieve such a high values like a purely dedicated server does,
4) You can’t choose a hardware firewall since more users share the same server (but this doesn’t mean that the server is without that hardware firewall).

If you’re not sure, try a virtual dedicated server hosting and if you’re not happy with the result, use a dedicated one.

Today I checked my server’s log files and found an attempt to access phpMyAdmin, so I decided to take steps to protect that directory. phpMyAdmin uses password protection to ensure that only authorized users can enter the area, but it’s an ordinary protection based upon HTML forms. So, to stop sending requests, I protected the directory itself. So let’s go quickly through what you should do when you want to protect  a directory:

0) Login via SSH (type “ssh IP_ADDRESS -l USERNAME“; where IP_ADDRESS is the IP address of your server and USERNAME is your login), and enter your password. You will probably also need to login as root, so type “su” and enter the root password.

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1) Find the Apache’s httpd.conf, as it is necessary to modify this file. If you’re a newbie, you may find this command very useful:

find / -name httpd.conf

It effectively does what it says on the tin: it tries to find the file named httpd.conf on your server (this is specified by “/” – use another path if you know where to search).

2) When you know the path (say it’s /etc/httpd/conf), type this command:

cd /etc/httpd/conf

Once again, if your server’s installation is structured differently, you must use another path.

3) Now modify the file httpd.conf. Before you do so, back up the existing file. So type these two commands:

cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.old
nano httpd.conf

4) When you’re done, you should see the content of the httpd.conf file on your screen. Find this part of the source code:

<directory>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
<directory>

The word “None” is bold because it determines that options like password protected directories are not allowed. Feel free to replace that “None” with “All” or “AuthConfig“. The “All” thing simply allows you to enable other features in the future, so I recommend it. Now, we have configured the default .htaccess file. Scroll down and you should find something like:

AllowOverride None

Once again, modify that line to:

AllowOverride All

This is all connected to the httpd.conf file. Press CTRL-X and you should be asked to confirm the filename and overwrite. Type “y” or “yes” and press ENTER.

5) Now change the current directory to the directory you want to protect. Say that you want to do the same thing as I did, and that phpMyAdmin is installed in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin. So type this:

cd /usr/share/phpMyAdmin

If you want to protect another directory, simply use another path according to your server’s configuration and structure of directories. Now, the very important part. Type:

nano .htaccess

If the .htaccess file already exists, you must add/modify a few lines. But let’s assume that the file doesn’t exist, so add this piece of code here:

AuthName “Password restricted area”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Please note that the text in bold, has to be modified for your setup. In any event, you have to specify the directory where the .htpasswd file is stored. It doesn’t necessarily have to exist at the moment.

If you already see an .htaccess file in the directory which you want to protect, make sure that the above-mentioned lines are not declared more than once.

When you’re done, press CTRL X and confirm the filename.

6) Now let’s create passwords and users. Type this:

htpasswd -cmb .htpasswd USER PASSWORD

Again, the bold text must be modified by you. USER is your username and PASSWORD is the password for the user. Just to be sure, after typing the above-mentioned command, type this:

nano .htpasswd

This should display some content. If it doesn’t, something went wrong

7) Now, let’s test if the password protection really works. Type the URL into your browser. If you’re not asked for a password and login, you must restart httpd. This can be done easily by typing:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

If necessary, use find / -name httpd in order to find the httpd file.

After restart, the desired directory should be password protected.

There are many theories that explain various approaches to achieving high rankings in search engines, but only a few which explain methods that actually work. Basically, we can say that there are three main schools of thought: the first one is based on links, the second on content, and the third is a combination of the two. So these are the general practises: 1) you’re told to submit your websites into hundreds or thousands of directories. The concept isn’t bad, but the real situation is less than ideal. Often, this advice comes from people who own directories. It isn’t unusual to see some of them asking £50/year per submission. £50 is not a lot of money, but if there are 100 directories which you want to submit your website into, then it adds up, and there’s no real guarantee of success.

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Members of the second school say that it’s content which matters. Of course, without quality content, it’s very difficult (though not impossible) to achieve decent rankings. However, you can’t expect a site with good-quality content but no links to achieve good rankings.

So naturally we come to a mix of these two approaches. This is the golden middle-road, but there’s still something missing. Let’s imagine this situation: you created useful content, hundreds of pages which are really worth reading. You submitted your website into directories, and after time this starts to show results. You can see people coming from Google and Yahoo! coming to your site. What’s wrong with this strategy? Many free directories will become inactive after some time. A number of directories are born every day, but just as in life, not everyone succeeds. People will stop visiting and submitting, and eventually it is likely that the domain will expire and will not be renewed. All links will simply cease to exist, and as they disappear, your rankings (which were based on these incoming links), will start to worsen. You can easily make new submissions every day, but a new link never carries as much weight as an older link.

You can also hope that people will link to your content, and often they will, but you can’t tell when and you can’t tell how. In my experience only a small portion of visitors create links. First, because only a small minority of internet users have websites, and secondly, an even smaller proportion will have websites that are relevant to yours. Finally, a still-smaller proportion will actually be willing to link to your site. If we wanted to be pessimistic about it, we could also consider that few of these links will actually carry very much weight in Google. Free web counters are a perfect example of how to get links quickly and easily: You just need to tell people about your free web counter. Of course, I prefer to use Google Analytics, as it brings more comfort and usability than any free web counter.

Here are a few methods to summarise how to get free links quickly: first, launch a tool (it doesn’t need to be unique) and spread the word about it. You can even advertise it in AdWords. Before you start working on any such tool, make sure that people will want to use it. There is no guarantee, and it’s always risky. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Second, ask people for links directly from pages of your website. This is very simple, add a paragraph saying something like: “If you like this page, use this HTML code on your website…” Believe it or not, this actually works. You will achieve a few links this way and it takes virtually no time to add that kind of code to web pages. Third, create a quiz. It’s a perfect way of getting links because once people have completed the quiz, they can post a banner or text link saying something like “I reached 83% in some kind of quiz.” Again, it works perfectly. Moreover, you can get thousands of free and fast links this way

My conclusion is this: you have to make people want to link to your website. It’s nonsense to pay hundreds of dollars for submissions into directories if you can achieve better results faster and with a lower budget. All of the three methods mentioned above can work for any website, whether it’s dogs, kitchens, computers, cars or healthcare. Give your visitors what they want, and persuade them to want to link to your site.

Naturally, you may find other effective ways to achieve higher rankings in search engines. It’s really up to you.

Have you been wondering about high-paid phrases/keywords in Google AdSense/AdWords? Really, there’s no trick to this, and there’s no easy way to find them. However, there does exist a golden rule which states: “these amounts are paid within search on Google, not within a contextual network!” Naturally, Google’s search usually leads to higher conversion because there is virtually no click-fraud. Google is unlikely to hire people to click on ads in search results. So, consider all of the below-mentioned phrases and amounts as the highest possible amounts. The real estimate is between 1/2 and 1/5 of these amounts. What’s more, your pages should be really targeted in order to make the most of it. For example, if you buy traffic and none of these people are interested in your ads, don’t expect high income. The opposite scenario is that you create a page which receives a high volume of organic traffic (traffic from search engines), arriving at your pages through phrases related to the ads. In such a case you can reach eCPM of $200 (or even more) with relative ease. So enjoy the list. It was created on 18th September 2008, so when you’re reading this post the actual data may be different. Also, bear in mind that these prices are valid for the top three positions in search results. Divide them by two to five to get a real estimate of your pages’ potential.

Some phrases may be present more than once in the list:

I’d like to share my experiences about dedicated server space bought from GoDaddy. Actually, it’s not 100% bought since I pay every month, so in fact, I’m just leasing it. Even though this may read like an advertisment, please rest assured that there is no relationship between me and GoDaddy from which I stand to profit.

My website (aqua-fish.net) is hosted on an unmanaged Linux-powered dedicated server, since I know a little about servers and GoDaddy offers you a range of control panels to choose from. A few months ago, after a series of network outages, I decided it was time to change my hosting provider. You might think that 10-60 minutes timeout every 2-3 weeks isn’t too worrying, but if your site receives 3-10,000 requests each hour, it’s a huge downtime. That’s at least 3000 unsatisfied requests from visitors and bots, but also from search engines. How can your website rank well with so many failed attempts?

Another point of view is accessibility. I don’t want to slander other webhosting companies (so they’re not mentioned here, but they’re at the bottom), but plenty of “dedicated server” hosting packages come with unbelievably low prices. What’s behind these low prices? A friend of mine who owns sport-cars.org tried at least four US-based companies and only one offered a normal connection speed. Many companies sell you servers cheaply, but their connection is like a dial-up from a garage! Here are two snapshots showing connection speed between Google and my primary website. The second snapshot shows the connection between sport-cars.org and Google too.

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As you can see, the previous hosting deal was limiting number of pages crawled per day, but the number of kilobytes downloaded per day (images and video files especially) and the time spent downloading a page are both now much more acceptable. Please bear in mind that the core files contain more than 30000 lines of code, hence it’s not lower than 423 milliseconds. Subdomains show better connectivity. All in all, the situation is much better now than it was before. Dedicated hosting brought not only stability (there is no network downtime now), but also speed.

Now, let’s look at the stats for sport-cars.org:

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In the end of August the site was moved from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server. Also the geographical location was changed from Slovakia to the USA. It is amazing how accessibility could get so much worse! More than 1500 milliseconds from 700 milliseconds previously. In addition, the original server was shared, not dedicated. In addition, aqua-fish.net was on the same server before, in Slovakia. After discovering the connection problem, my friend moved the site back to Slovakia. Later he found another company in the US, and tried again. The only good connection he found was in Slovakia. So… how can a website which is based in Slovakia be more accessible than the same website hosted in the USA? The answer is simple; it’s about hosting. You won’t get a good connection with every dedicated server.

The solution isn’t always buying a cheap dedicated server. There’s usually a reason why some dedicated servers are cheap; there’s often something lacking in their service: it could be connection speeds, downtime, and so on.

Of course, GoDaddy isn’t the most expensive hosting company and I pay only £90/month (including taxes). You can find rackspace offering managed dedicated servers for about £400/month or more. Yes, a managed server might cost more, but let’s take a look at why I chose an unmanaged package over a managed one.

If you pay for between 1 and 6 months in advance, your server’s configuration (software) should be up to date. After 6 months you can buy another new server and give up the old one. It isn’t that difficult. Of course, if you know how to install new packages, how to stop, start and restart services, and how to kill processes, then you can continue with an unmanaged server. On GoDaddy you can use their assistance services too, and it’s even possible to pay for these services for a limited time period. So, for instance you only need initial set-up and some basic configuration. So, you can order the shortest assistance plan available, and get exactly what you need. I needed some help from GoDaddy due to the external firewall which I pay for and they helped me with everything, giving clear instructions about what to do. The only thing I had to do was to run all commands myself.

With an unmanaged dedicated server you take all responsibility for every action. With managed one you’re not 100% responsible. But in my opinion it isn’t worth it paying a few hundreds of dollars for something you can do yourself.

So, my conclusion is this: don’t be amazed by cheap deals. Instead, try to find a really reliable company. I’m not saying that any company that offers dedicated server space for £30/month must be crap, but usually you get what you pay for: so, if you pay a reasonable amount, you get a decent package.

The friend mentioned earlier about used olm.net with very poor response time, and galaxyvisions.com failed to refund the money.

This is the second post in a short series on widgets. The first post was intended to serve as an introduction to widgets and to give some examples of what can be done with them. Now that you’ve been introduce to them, this post aims to introduce you to different methods of launching a widget campaign.

By this point you should have a good idea of what you would like your widget to do and more importantly the audience of your widget. If you have a concept in mind for a widget that your audience will find very useful you’ll hopefully find the widget spreading by itself, but of course before this happens you have to enable people to share it and even before that you need to get people using it in the first place.

When seeding your widget they are two approaches you can take. The first is to target those who are already familiar with your brand and your service. In theory this audience should be the easiest to get using your widget because if you’ve done the correct planning, you’ve produced something relevant and useful or entertaining for them. The second approach you can take to seed your widget is to target a relevant audience who might not be familiar with you but are your target audience or are people who are actively looking for widgets.

So, to return to the first approach, how can you seed your shiny new widget with your fans? Simply, use the existing channels you have to communicate with this audience. You probably already have a popular website so make sure you promote the widget prominently on the site. Secondly, you may have a good sized email marketing list, so why not use it to promote your widget. Finally, if you have a blog, make sure you write a post about your widget.

To tie it all in nicely, it would make sense to do all these things. So, create a new page on your website where you can embed the widget and can link to from all your different activity, write a blog post with screen shots of the widget, clear instructions if any are needed and let people why you think it will be useful or entertaining. Once you’ve done this, write an email newsletter (or write a section about your new widget in an existing newsletter you have going out), create an advert or promo section on your homepage and you’re away. PR’ing a new widget wouldn’t hurt either if you’ve got the resources to do so or work with an agency who handle this for you.

Ok, so how do you reach out to new audiences with your widget? Well, think about where your audience are online. Do they read specific blogs, visit certain websites? It’s very likely that they do and because you’ve produced a widget of relevance for your audience, the authors of the blogs and publishers of the sites you’ve found are hopefully going to be keen to embed your widget on their site. Once on these sites, you should find people engaging with your widget. If you don’t think it’s possible to get these sites and blogs to embed with widgets, you might be able to buy media space for your widget on their sites if you’ve built a widget that fits IAB standard sizes.

The other key way you can seed your widget with your target audience is by identifying widget communities, of which they are many, to post your widget. Each widget platform has a community/directory site where you can feature/advertise your widget. Yahoo, Mac, Vista, iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia all have widget communities/stores/directories that users browse looking for widgets that they will find useful. In addition to these are independent widget communities like widgetbox.

So now you have your seeding strategy in mind, it’s important to think about how you can enable your users to share the widget once they’ve found it. Unsurprisingly there are several widget distribution tools that you can plug yours into which enable users to easily post the widget to their blog, social network profile or website as well as share it with friends. At thrudigital, we actually built our own widget distributor for the In Bruges widget campaign we worked on. In search of a suitable web 2-esque name we named it Widgitio but also refer to it more simply as widget distributor.

Our tool allows users to easily post a widget to popular social network profiles and the reason why we created our own for this campaign rather than use an existing platform like Clearspring or Gigya is that our distribution tool enables the user to post the widget to more prominent positions on their profiles rather than to a generic boxes widget/application that might contain any number of widgets.

Finally, now you know how to seed the widget and have built in the tools to help it spread by itself you might want to include some kind of incentive to encourage people to share it. A simple way to do this might be to offer entry into a competition for every user who installs or downloads the widget.

Where next? Well by now you should know what a widget is and how to launch one but you probably need someone to build it for you. Infact you might be looking for someone to develop a concept and a launch plan in addition to building it, so why not give us a call to chat through what we can come up with. If you’re looking for examples of our work, you can check out the widget page of our services section or alternatively you might want to have a look at our portfolio.

This is the first in a series of blog posts on widgets. The aim of this first post is to introduce you to widgets, describe how they are different from applications  and what you can do with a widget. In a later post I will talk about how to launch a widget. If you’re still left with some questions on widgets having finished this article, please feel free to give us a call or if you’re looking for some examples of our widget work, please check out our page on widgets or alternatively our portfolio.

Probably best to start with a definition as that’s normally a good starting point, so here we go… a widget (which can also be known as a gadget) is a self-contained website/application that can be shared with friends and posted on any webpage, like a blog, social network profile or your own website.

It is also possible to create desktop widgets, which differ from a web widget in that they do not require a web browser to run, but otherwise are largely the same. Another point worth noting is that web widgets can without too much difficulty be adapted to work on mobiles which can add a new dimension to your widget.

Applications differ from widgets because they are not standalone and require an underlying platform, such as the Facebook or Bebo application platform to run. To read more about applications, please view the applications page where you can also see some examples.

So now you know what a widget is, it’s probably useful to know what can be done with a widget. Generally a widget can do anything a normal webpage can i.e. display any kind of content or data such as videos, photos, blogs & audio or any combination of these. Coupled with the ability for this content to be dynamic, controlled via an RSS feed or by CMS you are presented with a really blank canvas for your widget concept.

To help focus your ideas, I’m going to give some specific examples/guidance of what can be done.

* Create something useful
A utility widget might be a widget that delivers useful, relevant information to a user. Creating a truly useful widget concept requires an understanding of your target audience, what they do and how you can offer something (relevant to your products/service) to enhance what they do. This might be specific to the user, as in the example of the Nike+ widget given below or might be more general targeted at a group of users such as the Southwest Airlines widget also shown below. Utility widgets often have greater longevity as they fulfill a need or requirement.

Example: Nike+ and Southwest Airlines
Note: Both these widgets are desktop widgets and unfortunately we can’t claim that these are ours.

The Nike+ widget ties in with the Nike+ community site which helps users track their running activity and displays a users personal progress.

Ding, the Southwest Airlines widget delivers special offer and flight information to the users who have installed it.

* Create a game
Along with utility widgets, game widgets are often the most popular type of widget and often have greater longevity. A game widget might be relevant to your brand or company or might just be a fun game that you think users will like and will come back to play time and time again. When designing a game widget, as with any widget, it’s important to think about what can bring the user back to interact with the widget again.

* Distribute your content
Your widget could allow users to consume your content in environments away from you own site as well as sharing it with their friends. This could be the trailer for a film you’re releasing or maybe the latest/most popular videos/news/photos uploaded to your site.

Example: In Bruges Widget

The In Bruges widget promoting the release of the Universal Pictures film features photos from the film, along with a trailer and a synopsis.

Hopefully this blog post has been informative, but as mentioned at the beginning of the post, if you have any further questions please contact us. You may also find the follow post to this article useful, so please come back soon to read it.