So you have some awesome designs you have uploaded your design, you have set up your Shapeways Shop, you have shown your parents and the neighbors kid to their vacant amazement, so now what are you going to do?

Time to start promoting designs, and what better way than the Shapeways Widget. The Shapeways Widget allows you to embed your shop, or your favorites, or both into almost any website. It is relatively easy to use, you can customize the number of columns and rows, and it is a great way to drive traffic to your shop.  We do have one widget that consistently currently drives around 5,000 hits per month to the Shapeways site. Now imagine if a similar widget was part of your website, or a forum you frequent or anywhere that people may be interested in your product, your sales could go through the roof.

Using the widget also really shows how important it is to take some decent photos of your items and ensure they are in 450×324 or 700×519 format to ensure they sit right in the frames.

Below is a widget based on some of the items Cory Doctorow has featured on Boing Boing from the Shapeways community. A simple window that could sit along side your blog, Tumblr page or anywhere.

Here is the code used to generate a list of your favorites with Your Shop Name to replace YourShopName

<iframe frameborder=”0″ src=”https://www.shapeways.com/widget/include.php?fav=YOURSHOPNAME&style=light&rows=4&cols=1″ style=”border: 1px solid rgb(192, 192, 192); height: 620px; width: 168px;”> </iframe>

Now to tweak the columns and rows is fairly straight forward by adjusting the numbers in red, but you also need to tweak the height and width of the widget to fit, see the code and then the table below..

<iframe frameborder=”0″ src=”https://www.shapeways.com/widget/include.php?fav=YOURSHOPNAME&style=light&rows=4&cols=1”
style=”border: 1px solid rgb(192, 192, 192); height: 620px; width:
168px;”> </iframe>

cols/rows    width    height    if cols=1
1                168      176        height +12
2                320      320
3                474      464
4                628      608

Below is an example using this code with a 3 x 4 layout

<iframe frameborder=”0″ style=”border: 1px solid rgb(192, 192, 192); height: 464px; width: 628px;” src=”https://www.shapeways.com/widget/include.php?fav=YOURSHOPNAME&style=light&rows=3&cols=4″>

Or Virtox’s shop selection from Dutch Design Week with a dark frame.

<iframe frameborder=”0″ style=”border: 1px solid rgb(192, 192, 192); height: 182px; width: 628px;” src=”https://www.shapeways.com/widget/include.php?shop=virtox&shopcat=Dutch Design Week &style=dark“></iframe>

And for shop sections:

<iframe frameborder=”0″ style=” border:1px solid #c0c0c0; height:182px; width:628px;” src=”https://www.shapeways.com/widget/include.php?shop=YOURSHOPNAME&shopcat=SHOPSECTIONNAME&style=light”></iframe>

Now what do you hope to earn from this sort of exposure if placed in the right context? Stay tuned to the Shapeways blog and we will talk a little more about the value of self promotion.