Widgets, Widgets, Widgets

At SightPage.net, we make heavy use of widgets to make your SightPage dynamic and interactive. If you are new to Widgets, just look around our home page and you'll see a few in action. The Meebo Live Chat box is a widget. The "Start Right Now" form from FormLogix is a widget. Our blog is displayed right on our page through a widget (and by the way, a blog widget is called a "blidget").

Widgets are a central part of SightPage. Our goal is to integrate the best of the web into your SightPage, and widgets allow us to do exactly that. We don't have to create all the cool and useful stuff out there - we just want to help you take advantage of it all.

Widgets come in two basic varieties - desktop widgets, which can be found at places like Yahoo! Widgets. And web widgets, which are the kind that we use, and that you can put on your SightPage. A great collection of web Widgets can be found at Widgetbox (http://www.widgetbox.com/). That's where we got our blidget, and that's where we first were introduced to FormLogix. Just about any widget created at Widgetbox can be used on your SightPage, making it an ideal place for you to browse for interactive and fun ideas for your SightPage.

The basic idea behind Widgets, as it relates to us, is that you can go to a 3rd-party company and create and edit your widget on their web site. They output a snippet of code which uniquely identifies your widget, and then we place it on your SightPage. Any edits or changes that you make on your widget then automatically update to your SightPage.

Widgets are becoming more and more popular, and most of the time they are free. Sometimes free widgets will include advertising or links back to the provider, but usually they are minimally intrusive and a fair trade-off for using a free service.

And the widget community is growing. At Widgetbox, for example, the community there can create and add their own widgets, making them available for anyone to download.

We strongly believe in the power of widgets, and we are happy to help you create, edit, modify, and place any widget you can find into your SightPage. And let us know if you are looking for something in particular - chances are we can find it for you.

Finally, if anyone out there has created a widget that would be useful or beneficial to SightPage users, please let us know. We'll be happy to tell all our SightPage customers about it.

- Tom