Widgets the Right Way

A lot of sites are using widgets more, be it for ads, or these terrible social buttons that have emerged. Besides not wanting to spend time downloading the social buttons that I won’t use, what I hate the most is that they all have this in common: If they lag, they stall the rest of the page.

That’s because they document.write their contents into the page, which prevents all further rendering until they’ve loaded. Don’t do that. Read this from Rich Thornett about how to make your widgets suck less.