An integral part of the evolving Flightglobal is the introduction of widgets into the make up of our pages.
Widgets have their origins in blogs and other Web 2.0 services, but the use of them is becoming more widespread as sites recognise their potential and re-architecture to best accommodation their presence.
We’ve been making limited use of widgets for some time on our blogs – for example, the Woracle has a bunch of widgets in the right-hand column doing various things such as:
1) Navigation by date
2) A list of other relevant blogs (Blogroll),and
3) A graphical depiction of free-form tags (Tag Cloud)
We also make use of a Highest Rated Article widget displayed against Flightglobal articles.
However, we’re ramping up our use of widgets all over the site as they have some real benefits from an editor’s perspective.
1) They help keep pages really dynamic, updating in real time
2) They allow targeted content to be pulled together to form pages of rich, diverse content
3) They allow us to pull available third-party into Flightglobal pages, improving the user experience and the breadth of coverage
You can see a few examples of widgets starting to be used throughout the main area of the website. For example: on the Defence section home page we’ve got widgets on:
• Latest news
• Question of the week
• Related jobs
• Related blogs
• Latest posts from the DEW Line
• Eurofighter news
• Latest military discussion on AirSpace
We’ve plan to role this practice out to other section home pages very soon.
Additionally, Flightglobal is developing external-facing widgets.
By this I mean widgets for use by external parties on their sites.
This page showcases the kind of widget that other sites could use and tells you who to contact if you’re interested in having one on your site.
on December 4, 2007 8:56 AM | Reply
Mike,
Widget is a catch all term for a technical device and is usually employed in engineering as a short hand term when no specific name is at hand and with a slight tounge in cheekiness. Sadly just as the word technology has been hi-jacked by the likes of the BBC just to mean information technology it would seem that widget is being adopted to mean something else. This kind of perversion of words by people who don't know better is of intense irritation to us engineers.
Rob.