Plugins, Widgets and Apps – Oh My!

I love my iPhone. Before I bought it I had a cell phone, in fact I had many of them. I was almost annoyed that people could reach me no matter where I was or what I was doing. Everything changed the day I bought my iPhone. Sure, people could track me down even when I was in line at the bank or having lunch, but the iPhone has APPS. Those APPS made all the difference to me. Now I can download check out APPS at the APP store and load them seamlessly into my phone. I was struggling to hang a picture straight when a friend suggested I get the Stanley Level APP. I downloaded it and within two minutes I had a perfectly straight picture.

What the iPhone and APP store did for cell phones, CMS architecture does for websites. Now as your business grows your website can grow with it. Adding new products or services can sometimes mean a shift in internet marketing strategy. In the past, this would mean a complete re-design of the website leading to expenses that more often than not, left business owners leaving the website out of the business shift. Now with integrated website content management systems, many functions and features of your website can be nearly plug and play.

If a year after you build your website you decide you want to add photo galleries or a shopping cart? That used to mean a huge redesign and plenty of custom programming. Now these features can easily be integrated in with the rest of the site using website “add-ons” called plug-ins, widgets or apps.

What are plugins, widgets and APPS?

Think of them as mini programs that run individual features on your website. The nice thing is that your website CMS makes sure that all the different plugins, widgets and APPS can talk to each other and play nicely together.

Back in the dinosaur days of the internet when each page was hand-coded to be a “static” page, if you wanted to add a feature to your website, then each page would need to be altered and tweaked leading to costly bills from your website development company and a frustrated website owner.

Do plugins, widgets and apps cost money?

Some plugins, widgets and apps are free and some cost money. Some have a “free” personal version and small cost for a “professional” version. Some are free if you allow the creator to have credit on the bottom of your web page and a small cost if you want it privately labeled. If you use a website development company you should still expect to pay to have features added because plugins, widgets and apps take some work to integrate, but it will be a couple of hundred dollars vs. the old way where it would be thousands of dollars.

Plugins, widgets and apps are a significant breakthrough. One of the most common complaints by website owners is the cost of adding features. With plugins, widgets and apps the evolution of website development has taken a major leap forward.