The easy route is to use a service like Widgetbox. Once registered, you can create widgets (like the ones below) in a matter of minutes. I took a bit of extra time to create an image for the widget title, but this pays off by putting the YLF brand stamp on the widget.

Other default characteristics you can specify:

• Width and height
• Background color
• Headlines only versus Headlines and articles
• Whether images are displayed

Note these are only defaults. Your user can change these characteristics to suit their blog. Bear this in mind when creating your widget and try the different options to see whether they look OK.

Once you have created your widget it is immediately available on Widgetbox. See the YLF widgets here.

Likes:

• Quick and easy. It takes a few minutes to create a widget, and the result is easy for your readers to deploy.
• Monitoring tools. There is a nice little tool to monitor the performance of your widgets.

Dislikes:

• Limited creative. Widget customization options are a bit limited. I would like to make my widgets more graphic and “flat” (less gradient and less glass effect), but this isn’t possible. There is no way to change the text headlines to a different color, so you are stuck with their choice of blue. It might also be nice to have a background image.
• Ugly thumbnails. The thumbnail representation of my widgets on the Widgetbox site look pretty ugly, and they also reflect an older version of the widget in some cases. I think this might hurt my ability to get widget users, but I don’t want to design to their thumbnail.
• Neutered backlink. You don’t get a real backlink from the widget. People clicking on the widget will come to your site, but the Google crawler won’t recognize that link when calculating the ranking for your site. So if a blogger deploys your widget on their site instead of putting you in their blogroll, you lose the positive impact that the link would have had on your search engine rankings.

One thing to watch like a hawk with any widget is the overhead it adds to your user’s page load time after they have installed your widget. The widgetbox impact looks reasonable to the naked eye, but the widget does make quite a lengthy exchange with their server. Reload this page and watch the messages that appear at the bottom of your browser (e.g. “Read widgetserver.com” and “Transferring data from flash.quantserve.com…”). If I had a lot of other scripts on this site I might not be happy with this additional overhead.

Still, it is a very quick and easy way to create some nice looking, functional widgets. I think we will use these on YLF until we do something more sophisticated of our own.