Ask HN: How should I go about developing an html widget?

1 points by nicolasiac 8 years ago | 3 comments

So I am thinking of developing an html widget that can be added to any web page (similar to the way sharethis is added but will only display data, no posting). Just a few questions if anyone can help: 1) The widget will fetch data you enter on my website based on a unique code. Shall I return the whole html structure from my site? Or shall I build it on the client site? I want to prevent someone overriding my classes, so I was thinking inline styling or changing the class name on every regeneration of the widget. 2) Was thinking to give it for free and only charge a yearly subscription to remove the logo, or be able to add custom colors etc. What do you think? How does sharethis or other widgets monetize? 3) There should be some transformations as well so some plain javascript will be included. Shall I wrap it in an iframe? Or just call a cdn js file on my site?

microwavecamera 8 years ago |

CSS is all client side. Inline CSS can be overridden. Besides if I'm adding some 3rd party widget to my site I would want to be able to integrate it with the look and feel of my site. Embedded iframes are just ugly and most any modern web developers are not going to want to have to deal with an embedded iframe. That's like some old HTML4 stuff. Same goes with randomizing CSS via JS. I'm not going to want a bunch of crazy CSS injected into my webpage. What would this widget do? It would have to be one hell of a widget for me to pay a subscription fee for, especially when I just could make an equivalent on my own. The other consideration is the server side setup. What happens if your server goes down or get overloaded? Your users are going to either have slow load times or a broken element. That's a good way to lose a customer, especially if it's a businesses site. Your best bet for monetization is make it a Wordpress or some other popular CMS plugin and add some slick features for the paid version. There's already a market there for things like widgets.

nicolasiac 8 years ago | |

How about generating the html on site (without even signing in), so they could copy it over to their site then? That will mean they will have to come back to the site to generate new html (similar to wufoo). Maybe the paid feature could be creating a paid account to not reenter the data each time. I can't reveal too much regarding the actual widget but I believe is something many businesses will need.

nicolasiac 8 years ago |

Anyone?