Designing Social Media Feed Widgets
Build custom, branded feeds that fit your website
As social media has become a stronger component of our clients’ marketing efforts, we’ve had the opportunity to use several of the standard social media widgets when building websites to add the various feeds into pages. This past week I decided to push the bar and not settle for what I was being provided by the masses. After spending some time online researching various treatments, I found a few that went above the standard widget. The styles of those feeds didn’t really fit with what I was going for, but it did show me that the mold could be broken and designed a lot better.
After looking through the different sites, I chose a feed that I thought was close to what I wanted functionality wise, but it needed some design help. Once I had the feed on the page and it was running like it should – pulling our BLU feed and rotating accordingly – I started ripping apart the old design and rebuilding it to fit the overall look and feel of the website. Everything about the feed was customized – the size of the feed, background colors, images, font, etc. It took a while to figure out where all of those styles needed to go, but once I figured it out the build went quickly.
As a designer it can be frustrating to come up with a new design only to have the programmer tell you that they can only do this or do that (damn budget restrictions!). However, this time that wasn’t the case. I was able to make the end result look exactly how I had envisioned it and the new social media feed fit beautifully into the page.
Not everyone understands the struggle between design and programming. When I started designing for web I felt very restricted – it’s so different than print design – but once I learned how to work with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and how to move objects around the page, a whole new world opened up to me. It’s those skills and knowledge combined with my passion for design that led me to go away from the standard social media feed widget and build my own. Good-bye standard Twitter widget. Hello beautiful custom feed.
Are you interested in raising the bar of your social media feeds or marketing overall? Give us a call 608.519.3070 to begin the conversation.
