Introducing our new search widget for webmasters
Here at GSMArena we"ve spent a lot of time working on new tools to help you, our readers, pick the right smart device for you. The latest thing to come from our lab is a little different though - it"s not for our homepage, it"s meant to improve your own phone-centric site.
We"re introducing a search widget that is easy to use (for webmasters and users alike) and provides condensed info for a wide variety of phones and tablets. The widget has an intuitive interface and shows product images, so it will hopefully make finding the desired device pretty simple.
Here"s what the widget looks like. Go ahead and start typing in the search box below:
When expanded, the widget provides condensed info on a device"s availability, physical dimensions, screen, camera, chipset and storage. If the full specifications are needed, there"s a link to our site at the bottom too.
When collapsed, the widget is just a single line so the impact on your site"s design and screen real estate is kept to a minimum. We"ve done our best to optimize the search widget for both wide and narrow layouts. The narrow layout is for sidebars that are between 320px and 400px (in those cases the narrow version is chosen automatically, you don"t need to make any corrections to the code).
The widget can be used with a traditional mouse/keyboard setup, or with a touchscreen device. Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and smartphone browsers are all supported.
Here"s what webmasters who want to use our search widget on their site need to do: simply include the following JavaScript file in the location on your page where you would like the widget to be - the script will handle the rest.
The code should look like this:
The search widget is still in beta - we can"t test everything in-house as there are far too many different web site designs and web browsers out there.
So, if you do use our widget, post a link to your site in the comments and whether you had any problems with it. We"ll also appreciate feedback from people who visit those sites - please provide info about your browser and just what went wrong.
Note that not all phones and tablets in our database are accessible through this widget - the devices with the lowest interest aren"t present, but very few people would be searching for them anyway.
We"re keen to hear ideas for new features for the search widget too - this is the first tool we develop for external sites and we"d like to know if you want its functionality expanded in any way and if there"s enough interest to warrant further development in the first place.