Want to make your site stand out from the crowd? Stock it with a mortgage calculator, a Zillow home-value estimator and other handy tools. You don’t need a degree in programming to make this happen; just head to Widgetbox (www.widgetbox.com), home to thousands of “widgets” you can use free of charge.
A widget is basically a little bit of code that runs a program or pulls content from another Web site, usually placing it in a small box. If you’ve ever seen a YouTube video on a site other than YouTube, that’s a widget in action. The owner of that site merely copied and pasted a few lines of code from YouTube proper (something you’ll want to do yourself—see the next item for details). The video player is the widget; the code includes instructions on which video to stream from YouTube.
Widgets can add a ton of value to your site, but don’t go overboard. Nobody likes a site that’s too cluttered.
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