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Widgets to Take Your Website to the Next Level

  |   Insights, Technology, Website Development   |   No comment

Is your website functioning as an online business card?

If it’s been a while since you updated your organization’s website, you may be missing out on some simple ways to make it more engaging.

Widgets (sometimes called modules or plug-ins) are blocks of code that can be easily added to modern websites to add variety and functionality. For example, here on the Tripepi Smith website, we use two widgets in the column to the right of our Insights posts. The first, on top, is the “Recent News” widget, showcasing recent company news. Below that we have employed a widget that shows a different quote from a satisfied client every time the page is loaded.

Down at the bottom of every page we list our recent posts by title, offer an opportunity for visitors to sign up for our newsletter, and showcase our recent tweets from Twitter.

In addition to making your website more engaging, widgets can help lead visitors to new sections of your site. It is more and more the case these days that visitors to your website are not landing on your home page first. If you have content you want people to see, you need to present multiple ways to them to discover it. Say, for instance, someone follows a link from your newsletter to an article about management strategies, and while there they see, in the side bar, a link to information about an upcoming seminar you’re sponsoring. That’s a well-utilized opportunity.

If, instead, that same visitor clicks to read your article on management strategies, and sees nothing else on the page for them to continue exploring, they will likely click away from your site. The longer you can keep someone engaged, the more likely you are to transform that individual from a visitor to a client.

Not sure what type of widgets would work for your site? Here’s a short list of just few we think are fun and engaging:

  • Quotes from happy clients
  • Facebook feeds
  • Twitter feeds
  • Contact forms
  • Calendars
  • Newsletter sign-up forms
  • Slideshows
  • Video snippets (embeded from YouTube)
  • Short polls
  • Count downs to important events
  • Contact us information (with a clickable google map and/or phone number)
  • Chat windows (especially for customer service)

For more ideas on how to make your site more engaging. Contact us today.

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