Gadgets for your website
Please note this article was first published in 12 Apr 2011. Its content may now be out of date. We recommend taking a look at more recent website building blog posts or check out our comprehensive support pages. If you are looking for information on our 14 day free website builder trial we have a large number of webpages that guide you throug the process.
Gadgets for your website
There are thousands of Gadgets available, which you can add to your website to make your webpages more interesting and useful to your visitors. You can add your area’s temperature or weather guide, horoscopes or even include a game to encourage visitors to come on to your site regularly and repeatedly and spend time on your pages. As a website builder, by giving more to your visitors, you will encourage them to take the time to browse your pages to see what you are offering and make a visit to your site both fun and informative. You should of course make sure that the main products and services you are offering take centre stage but offering additional incentives can increase traffic, make visitors come back to your site regularly and keep visitors with you for longer.
website gadgets
Let’s have a look at some of the most popular, fun and useful gadgets available.
Gadgets from Google are available in the following categories and are very easy to use: News, Tools, Communication, Fun & Games, Finance, Sports, Lifestyle, Technology and New Stuff.
Date and Time and Calendars gadgets are one of the most popular and offer instant useful information to visitors.
News Updates and Feeds, Weather Forecasts, Map searches are great informative gadgets.
Games and Jokes will keep your visitors entertained and encourage them to visit your site regularly. Quotes or Words of the day are fun and very popular with internet users.
Tips and Advice -If your business is health related why not include a health or beauty advice gadget from the lifestyle category!
Ebay Search – If you’re website works alongside an additional ebay shop, which lots of ecommerce sites do, then this search gadget is a great way to guide people from your website shop to your ebay shop. Remember to add your shop name to the title of the gadget so that they can find you quickly and easily!
Photo Albums. This is a great additional way to share lots of images with your customers in a gallery format. Picasa and Flickr photo gadgets are both available from Google.
Currency Converters can be a very useful gadget for your visitors especially if you do business overseas. Again for international visitors, the translator gadget is very useful.
Google offer an incredible choice of gadgets and you can view these by typing Google gadgets into a search bar. The menu is very clearly laid out where you can click to get more details or simply click the “Add to your webpage” link to get the code.
When you click the “Add to your webpage” link, you’ll be given a few simple options to customise the gadget so that it sits perfectly on your page and can even be colour co-ordinated with your website. Options normally include a title, width and height and border colour. Select your preferences and click the Preview button to see how it looks. Once you’re happy click the “Get the Code” button. A new window will open which includes the code for your customised gadget. Simply highlight all the code and copy it by right clicking and going down to copy or by hitting the Ctrl and C keys on your keyboard at the same time.
It’s always a good idea to paste your copied code onto a “notepad” document so you have a copy of it to hand either for reference or should you need to make any amendments to your gadget.
To add your gadget: open the editor on the page on which you’d like your gadget to appear. When you click the “Show HTML” button, this will open your page in HTML form, which can look a little daunting and confusing as it will be a page full of code. The trick to make things easy for you is to enter a guide mark on your page while still in the normal editor view, so, while still in the editor view, tab down to a clean line and type “**************GADGET CODE***********” and position this text exactly where you need it to appear by setting its alignment – left, right or centre. Alternatively you can insert a simple one row, one column table onto your page which you can align either left, right or centre to sit neatly within existing copy and then enter the same “**************GADGET CODE***********” into the table to show you where to paste your code.
Now, click your “Show HTML” button and scroll through the code to find the <p>************GADGET CODE***********</p>. Highlight the “***********GADGET CODE********” making sure you highlight only the text staying with each open and close brackets (> <) and then paste your gadget code in its place replacing your ***GADGET CODE*** marker. It’s very important to make sure your code sits exactly between the <p> and </p>.
Once in place, click the show HTML button again to show the page in editor view. Sometimes, you may not see your active gadget until you save the page and view it in live page mode.
Have fun with your gadgets!
Please remember, this article was first published 12/04/2011. The content may be out of date and you cannot post comments any more. Please check out our new blog.
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