When I redesigned the theme, I added a few magazine style widgets to the blog. Many of you emailed me to ask, how you can add a similar magazine style to your blog. In this post, we will look at how you can create your own magazine style widget using Netvibes.

The entire tutorial consists of two processes. The first process involves creating your custom Netvibes widget. The second process involves customizing and adding the widget to your blog.

Creating a Netvibes Widget

Step 1: Sign in to your Netvibes account. You will need to create one if you don’t have an account.

Step 2: Once you have signed in to your account, click on the “Create or submit button” in the navigation bar.

Step 3: Click on the “Create widget” button in the overlay that pops up.

Step 4: Choose whether you want to create a Blog/News widget or a Multifeed widget. In this tutorial, we will deal with single blog/news feed widget.

Step 5: Enter the feed URL into the text box and click on the Next step button.

Step 6: On the next page, enter all the details about the feed and choose whether or not you want to publish the widget to the ecosystem, and click on the next step button.

Step 7: If everything goes fine, a link to your new custom widget will be displayed to you. Please make not of the link as we will be using the link in the future.

Adding a Netvibes Widget to Your Blog

Once you have created the widget, you can now add it to your blog. Follow the steps given below to customize and add the widget to your blog. For this example, we will make use of the Techie Buzz Netvibes widget.

Step 1: Copy and paste the link you got from Step 7 in a new browser tab or window.

Step 2: Click on the Share link in the widget sidebar, this will take you to a new page where you can customize the widget.

Step 3: You can customize the widget by adding a title to it, changing the height and modifying its color.

Step 4: Under “Widget preferences” select Magazine from the view dropdown to create a magazine style widget. You can also configure other things such as, number of items to display, whether links should open in new windows.You can also choose to display the post data and excerpt.

Step 4: Once you have configured the widget, go to the bottom of the page to get the widget code. You will need to paste the code into your website for the widget to be displayed.

Using the above steps you can build as many magazine style widgets you want and customize them using several options. Of course, Netvibes also providers users with many different styles to choose from.

Looking for more tips and tricks for your website? Don’t forget to visit the Webmaster tips section to learn more.