StickiWidgets

Gas prices hitting you in the pocket book? Try out this Gas Price widget by Motor Trend/Automotive.com. We can’t vouch for the accuracy of the data so try at your own risk.

Overall it’s a pretty simple widget. You enter your zip code, radius for search, gas type and sort order. You are then provided with “up-to-date” (as claimed by the widget creators) gas price list for your area and the locations. The widget has the usual links back to the parent site and Clearspring powered sharing tools.

One simple feature that we felt was overlooked is a “Map It” feature. On each of the listings a “Map It” button could link the user to a Google Maps powered page on Automotive.com. This could easily drive more traffic to the site and that map/directions page could be monetized. Leveraging Google Maps or even any other mapping system would be dead simple.

Lastly, we thought the in-widget ad was a good idea but fell a bit short. The ad was just too long; we clocked it at about 5 seconds. By that time a user’s probably glanced at the widget, processed it as an ad and moved on. Shorten it to 3 seconds and you might actually have a chance of transitioning to the widget while the user’s still paying attention to the ad/widget space. Or, at the very least, not cover the entire widget with the ad so that a user knows that there’s something worth waiting for underneath.