Ever since Archon Digital created a Facebook Fan Page several months ago, it was only this December 2009 that I decided to put that Fan Box widget up on the sidebar just to see how it goes as a replacement to my Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog widgets which I removed after launching version 5.

So I guess I’m a sucker for widgets and always wanted to try out what I find nice more than what can possibly be effective.

The Fan Box widget came up as I decided rid myself of the two visitor widgets that I have had for more than a year. It was easy to configure as I edited it to fit the width of my sidebar.

So after a month of keeping the big Fan box with friend’s pictures, here some ideas I have that I think will make the widget perform better.

• Should be more customizable and have the ability to style the widget according to the look and feel of your website.
• It should load faster and consume less server resources
• It should load all the time and not just most of the time

Those three points should make the widget become more interesting to bloggers. I gained more “fans” in a shorter span of time than in the time that the widget was not there but still it was not enough for me to keep the big bulky widget up as it was simply too big and clunky for my taste.

After observing how it gets my pages to load a bit slower, I decided to replace it for now with a smaller Fan Box configured without the logo and the fans’ images. The smaller version occupies less vertical space and does the same job of having a one-step process of gaining “fans” for your site. Here it is and see how less clunky it is.

Let’s see if it performs better and after another month I will check again make some more adjustments if needed, for now the widget stays.