Building a Brand with Widgets. The customizable bits of software on Facebook and other social networking sites are the latest trend in viral marketing. But are widgets here to stay? The cards were stacked against A&E Television Network as it tried to generate positive buzz about its new series, Parking Wars. For one, it's a reality show about meter readers.
Two, the show doesn't feature celebrities. So A&E hired area/code, a multimedia game developer, to build an online game based on Parking Wars. Grand Theft Auto it's not. Raising Brand Awareness "It's surpassing our expectations," Peterzell says. Interest in widgets is rising as marketers become disaffected by other methods of online advertising, especially on social networks. Some marketers say widgets may do a better job engaging users than, say, so-called banner ads emblazoned across the sides of social network profiles. Some Facebook Campaigns Have Fizzled There's plenty of anecdotal success. The potential audience is vast. A Short Shelf Life for Many Widgets. The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required t. Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers. An aspiring blogger can be overwhelmed with the vast amount of resources, tools, and advice for bloggers available on the net.
While in no way definitive - there's simply too much going on in this space to cover it all - we did our best to bring you a comprehensive list of blogging resources, which should be equally useful to beginners as well as veteran bloggers. Enjoy. WordPress WordPress Themes ThemeViewer - The number one location to find WordPress themes to make your page cool, which you will most certainly want to do.Templates Now - A smaller collection of WordPress themes, but still worth your while to check out.TemplateMonster - If you want more professional quality themes then this site can be useful.
They offer extremely high quality themes that you can purchasefor WordPress.Wordpress Themes - a neatly categorized site with a huge selection of themes Best WordPress Plugins Akismet - The best blog comment spam prevention plug-in. Wordpress Plugin repositories Movable Type Tips. Mike Davidson: How To Keep Widgets From Slowing Down Sites: WEDJ. The whole world is going to widgets. This overused, overhyped term refers to third-party code one places on their website or blog in order to display such things as Flickr photos, Twitter status, or iTunes playlists. Everybody and their mom is putting out widgets these days, and although only about 1% of them are useful or interesting, they are an important new distribution mechanism that is changing the way companies think about syndication.
But there is a big problem with widgets: they slow down the sites that use them . In the best case, you have a company like Flickr whose servers are almost always snappy, and in the worst case, you have a young startup that is constantly struggling against increasing demand and occasionally can’t serve up any code at all. The problem is that in either of these cases, the completion of your site’s loading and rendering depends on someone else’s code living on someone else’s server. Following is a breakdown: Root Causes The Solution: WEDJE Caveats 1. 2. Widgetbox › Directory of web widgets for WordPress, TypePad, MyS.
World Wide Web of Widgets. The web has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so. So let's explore what a widget is and its uses. Note that in this post, we're discussing Web-based widgets only, rather than desktop widgets such as those provided by Yahoo Widgets or Microsoft's Vista widgets. A Web widget can be best described as a mini application that can add functionality to your web page, blog, social profile etc. If you find a widget that you like, you simply copy and paste some code and add it to the HTML of your web page.
Give me an example! There have been a lot of very successful widgets to date. MyBlogLog is a widget that allows you to see other bloggers on the MyBlogLog network, as they visit your site. YouTube's widget allows users to place videos on their social networking profiles and blogs. Google Adsense has made a lot of money for website owners since its inception. The FeedBurner widget shows you how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed.
Widget Platforms Mobile Widgets.