Widget Design Standards
From Widget Standards
Contents |
Intro
To the vast majority of widget adopters and viewers, a standard widget will mean standard ways in "how they look". Size, shape, colors, buttons, coding (Flash, Ajax, HTML), and how elements are placed within the widget all factor into how users react to a widget, which in turn leads to how effective the widget will be.
Standard Widget Size
There are two ways in which to build and distribute your widget - in a static or customizable size. We will use pixels as the unit of measure, and not inches or relative screen size.
Wide verses Tall
The majority of widgets generally fall into three shapes - square, a 4 x 3 aspect ratio (useful for video widgets), or taller than they are wide widgets. Few widgets are designed to be much wider than they are tall (this is mainly due to the way most webpages are set up).
Static Sized Widgets
Static sized widgets have a set height and width. As many widgets are intended for the sidebars of pages, not exceeding a certain width is more important than setting an absolute height. As most sidebars are usually no larger than 300 pixels, static widgets should not exceed this set width as well. A width of 200 pixels is probably more appropriate in many cases as the narrower the widget, the more sidebars it will fit into. However, remember not to make your widget too narrow as you will run out of space for your content, especially if your content is text based. All widgets are not intended for sidebars, however. Some widgets are intended for the main content section of a page, and therefore may be larger than those designed for sidebars. In this case, it is best to know your target users and how much space they have on their page. Even so, a widget that is larger than 600 x 450 pixels (or similar proportions) would most certainly look out of place on most webpages, so if you plan to set a static size, keep this in mind.
Customizable Sized Widgets
It is highly recommended all widgets be customizable by the adopter of the widget. To do this, the widget developer can offer to allow the user to set whatever height and width that they choose, without regard to how that will effect how the widget's content is displayed (however, as most widgets become pointless if their content is displayed incorrectly, adopter generally will not distort the content to an extreme). Another option is for the developer to offer a set of preset sizes that the adopter can choose from (i.e. 400 x 300 pixels or 200 x 100 pixels, etc). With either of these options, it is highly recommended that the developer set a minimum and probably maximum size for the standard widget, preferably sizes that will allow the widget to properly display its content.
