Despite the slightly cheeky post title, this is important (to me anyway).

I’m building the spec for an application which creates an embeddable widget. I want to work out what the most common sizes for embedded widgets are so that we can think about how to format the content.

At present I’m plucking figures out of the air but 200-250 pixels wide for a sidebar and 400-600 wide for a content area would seem to be sensible estimates. I know that the widget should resize but the basic size will govern which content is (or isn’t) displayed and how it is formatted.

Looking at some examples of embeddable widgets, the sizes are:

Compete.com

• Small (310 x 170)
• Medium (460 x 188)
• Large (658 x 268)

Alexa.com

• configurable up to 400 x 300

Yahoo finance

• small (160 wide)
• medium (200 wide)
• large (250 wide)
• x-large(300 wide)

The Yahoo widgets are generally always in a portrait format and mostly designed for use in a sidebar. The widget that we are building will more likely be a landscape format so has more in common with the compete snapshots. I do think, however the compete are missing out by not having a slightly narrower option for smaller sidebars.

I’m hoping that somebody out there has an opinion on this, otherwise I’ll just do the usual thing and define my own standard and then try to get everybody else to fall in line with it