Widgets, and badges, and more: Oh my!

It’s not as much fun to say as lions, and tigers, and bears, but I’ll explain why they can be more helpful than carnivorous mammals.

Image Credit: "Pick me! Pick me!" By captainxo

A few things you should know before we get started…

Widgets

First, according to Wikipedia, a widget is “a stand-alone application that can be embedded into third party sites by any user on a page where they have rights of authorship (user can edit coding of page).”

Example:

I use widgets a lot on this blog. If you look on the right side, each of the different items is a widget enabled by the blog theme. There’s a widget at the bottom of the page too! (See word clouds.)

Badges

Second, also according to Wikipedia, a badge is “a small image used on websites to promote web standards, products used in the creation of a web page or product, to indicate a specific content license that is applied to the content or design of a website.”

Think of badges as bling or flair. You can show of all the cool stuff that means something to you.

Example:

I got this badge off the HTML5 logo creation site. You often have to click on the badge to find out what it means. Maybe you should do that for this one too! 😉

Practicality

For a company or nonprofit, the use of badges and widgets can come in handy. A company can create a badge or widget for others to display on their website. For donating to a cause, someone could get a “giving badge” to share.

A widget can be created to provide a special service to either clients or potential customers. Think industry news! Or a countdown till the release of a book, movie, or event. People love to display widgets (gadgets for windows) on their desktop and blog, so make sure whatever you create is versatile.