How best to go about creating an application?

[neilpagecruise]

Hi there,

I work within the travel sector, and I've had an idea of getting an embeddable application built, which would be of use to my company, but also lots of other companies (our competitors) and general websites in our niche.

The idea would be that we'd get (and pay for) the application to be built, and then allow other parties to embed it into their site with a snippet of our code so we get the link back from them.

There are obviously some technical issues here. The app will be built with Javascript (we can't use PHP on our web server , its a long story!) and I'd want a way to stop other swiping the code and using without the link to us. Is this going to be possible?

Also, whats going to be the best way to get the link from them? If a competitor used it, they are less likely to do so with our company name plastered all over it, so it would need to be subtle, or an image link, or something. Not sure.

Anyone done this sort of thing before?

Thanks

[firstconversion]

Widgets are a long established staple of linkbuilding. Go ahead, it works

However, your competitors wont use anything with your logo on it and its tough to stop them removing your code links.

If you want your competitors to use it, best bet is to sidestep the entire issue and make a brand new, neutral site that promotes the widget. Then link back to yourself from that site (or sites)

[neilpagecruise]

Hi Stephen - Thanks for that.

I definitely hadn't considered building a new site to promote it. If I managed to get quite a lot of other companies using it, and linking to this site, it would build up a pretty impressive profile of links, and be a great link for our site. Definitely food for thought.

Thanks