Home » Education

Make Your Own Widgets

Ranked #7,487 in Education, #164,222 overall

Free Advertising and Traffic for your Website or Blog!

Creating your own widgets (which are small dynamic content applications) and making them available in directories and on your own site for other people to add to their webite, blog, myspace page, and so on, can be a really great way to generate free traffic and to build up a strong brand for your own site. If you want to go 'viral' and generate huge amounts of traffic from people promoting your links for you for free, then building a fun, interesting, useful widget is probably the easiest way to do it.
And the great thing is it's actually very easy to begin developing your own widgets, and using the resources on this page you will be making killer viral apps in no time!
And if you like this, then you will absoultely love learning How to Make Your Own iPhone Apps!

Turn Your RSS Feeds into a Widget

This is the easiest way to make your own widget, and can be a surprisingly effective tool for promoting your blog, website, or even your squidoo lens feed!
All you need to do is visit this page of the Widgetbox website, add your rss feed address, and they will not only turn it into a widget, but they will add it to their directory and promote it for you to! You can also custom the design with a very simple interface.
To make the most out of it I would advise you to join one of their 'channels', and ad the channel widget to your site somewhere - the extra promotion you get for your feed will make it well worth doing.

Video and Flash

A simple text widget displaying your blog feed is all well and good, and it can generate a suprisingly large amount of traffic - as long as you have interesting titles for your posts so that people will click through - but video and flash applications are much more popular and therefore generate more traffic.
Why not try making a short video, cartoon, game or other flash file to promote your site - it doesn't have to be high quality graphics / production to go viral and generate huge traffic, but remember that it doe need to be interesting and entertaining, so don't just make a video sales pitch and expect it to work wonders!
Turning your flash file into a widget is just as easy as it is for an rss feed using Widgetbox

Google Gadgets

Ready to take the next step? Learn basic programming for creating widgets.

If you want to go beyond the basic standard feeds and flash files that you can add to widgetbox to create more interesting and interactive widgets, but you don't know the first thing about the programming you would need to make them, then google gadgets was set up for people like you!

They have a step by step guide to all the basics that you will need, and best off all they also have an editor that you can use to play around with different stuff, and some sample code templates you can load into the editor and the play around with so that you can figure out how everything works. Widgetbox do also have an editor along the same kind of lines, but its more limited and they don't offer as much help and guidance for people who don't know exactly what they ar doing in advance.

I won't lie to you and say a beginner could pick it up instantly and have their own cool apps in a matter of hours, but if you have a day or two to just mess around and try things out then you should be able to grasp the basics with no problem at all.

In actual fact, if you are a complete beginner wanting to learn any kind of programming using Javascript and XHTML, then this is one of the best places you can go to learn where you can develop usable skills in a short time.

Some Inspiration:

My pick of some of the best widgets featured on Widgetbox

Spiritual and New Age Gallery: psychic 8 ball, daily horoscopes and loads more.
Games Gallery: free flash games
News Gallery: news feeds and more

Promote Your Widget

Both Google Gadgets and Widgetbox have their own open directories that you will be able to add to for free, but don't forget to also add a link or button for people to grab it from your own site.
You can also use squidoo for promotion! Create a lens dedicated to each one you create and giving visitors additional info and resouces, and don't forget to also add every one you make to the lensmaster widget links plexo below to get it featured on both this page and my Add Widgets to Your Website or Blog lens, which targets people who are looking for free content to add to their pages!

Lensmasters Widget List

If you are a Squidoo lensmaster and you have developed your own widget to promote online business then please feel free to add a link to it here, so we can check them all out and vote for our favourites!
Links to single applications only - no homepage / website links!

Make Your Own Widgets

Free Advertising and Traffic for your Website or Blog!

Contents at a Glance

Contents at a Glance

Turn Your RSS Feeds into a Widget

Video and Flash

Google Gadgets

Ready to take the next step? Learn basic programming for creating widgets.

Some Inspiration:

My pick of some of the best widgets featured on Widgetbox

Promote Your Widget

Lensmasters Widget List

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68