141 replies to this topic

[SpiderWebDev]

Hi Everybody,

After having many conversations with a bunch of my friends here. I have decided to start a thread that will, once week, provide you with some actionable tips on internet marketing best practices, email marketing, and website management. I will not be selling anything. If you just want a site check please handle that in a different thread (allthough I will take a look if you PM). The idea is not to have a ton of posts as to everybodies thoughts on the topics, but to provide you with clear, concise, answers to issues you all face and might like answers for.

If you have questions about any of these discussions, please ask those here. Because even tho I like to think I speak "Earthling", my wife informs me that sometimes she wonders what planet I'm from... And sometimes what I think is perfectly clear is a bit muddy, especially when we discuss some technical issues. The idea is to keep the pages to a minimum so that if someone is looking for something specific that is discussed, they can find it quickly and won't have to click through pages and pages of "me too's", "I did that's", and "if that ain't the darnedest thing's".

Also, if there is something you want to learn how to do...post that here. I will promise to check at least once a day (well maybe not once a day ) or as often as possible. But I will present a new main topic once a week. Questions that are specific to you, I may handle privately with you directly, especially if it has no value to the group. I will not deal with specific keywords or strategies that are specific to your company or website. I know many of you, while friendly here, are competitors, so I want to make sure that any "Sneaky Tricks" are available on a level playing field.

Fair enough?? If not Moderators please zap this post as soon as possible... otherwise GAME ON!

[SpiderWebDev]

Step 1 to getting it together with your website.

The most common question asked when anyone sets up their first website is "OK I have a website, now what?" You might say, that's easy, "Go promote the heck out of it". (Someone of you may use a different adjective...) Well, the basis of that statement is true, but what is really the first step to promote your site properly?

You need to submit your website address (URL), site description, and site category type, to those who make it their business to keep the internet as organized as possible. (Most people think that was Al Gore's job...but no, no, no.) Before you go through this process, it's very important that you sit down and write out what these three statements will contain. Obviously the URL is simple, that is your www.VeryCoolWebsite.com address. The other two statements are not as simple as you would think. Having already seen some of your <meta description> tags, you might agree.

Now when you flub a bit on your meta tag description, no harm, no foul, you just go in and fix it. However, with site submission, trying to fix a flubbed description could take decades to track down let alone fix. Once submitted, your website information is shared with hundreds, nay, thousands of internet information users, cataloggers and search engines who may or may not update their information. So the chances of what you submit hanging around until your great-great-grandchildren die of old age is pretty high. So get that right the first time. Write, re-write, show it to anybody who will take a second to actually read it and then re-write it a few more times. Especially have your kids read it.... ("Hey Dad, don't you think you should say we live in Boston?" sheesh, out of the mouthes of babes) Remember your 3 most important keywords? Are they mentioned in this description? Better be...

Finally what is the "category"? Again you say simply "Bounce rentals...duh" You would be amazed that you can find this one term has been spread over no less 25 different categories. Business Arts, Amusement Parks and Attractions, Recreation and Sports, Event Planning, Entertainment, etc etc... Then you get into the regional stuff. My point is, you need to decide what will work best for your customers, not what some Bozo entered under Business Arts (Sorry Bozo...nothing personal)

So let's get to the submission. Go to: www.dmoz.org

This site is known as the open directory project. This is the primary source, even folks like Google turns to, to get information about your website until they index and dive deeper into your website themselves. Even after they know all about you, it's not uncommon for them or other search engines to use your dmoz description when the results of a search are presented. Thus my admonition to get it right the first time.

Ok so you found Dmoz.... The first thing you'll want to do is search for your company and or website. Believe it or not, they may already have an opinion about you. (uh oh!) Yes some other bizzy body might have submit info on your site, or they had a need to find out. If your information is there and you're ok with it, cool move on. If it is not correct, you'll need to submit a request to update the description through their Dmoz Editors staff. hit the Help link and follow the instructions. I can tell you this is a maddening process.

Now try some searches on your keywords and see the results. Not so much for who they return but categories they return. Remember you're trying to decide which category works best for you. Then try searching for some companies in your neighborhood. Especially the big ones. Chances are they spent a few bucks hiring a pro to set this up for them and why reinvent the wheel if you can glom on to some free intell. After the keyword search and business searches you should have a pretty good list of possible categories that would apply to you. Try not to close your eyes and go "Eenie, Meneeie, Miennie....", but think about it as the other businesses in your community have and maybe as your customers might see you and pick the best one.

At that point you should be on the page of returns that is made up of the category you want to be a part of. At the top of the page is the "add URL" link. Click and follow the instructions. Click yes I promise this is true, submit and let out a sigh of relief.

Am I done you ask? No... Since your already got you submission pants on, might as well as hit all rest too. That is, all the rest of the "FREE ONES". Do Not Pay for Website submissions. Here are a list of some common Submission sites:

http://www.submitexp...com/submit.html
http://www.addme.com/
http://www.entireweb...ree_submission/

So if you use these you should be completely covered for Search Engine submission. Don't forget you can also go directly to Yahoo, Google and MSN and submit your URL there, but it won't carry as much weight, and sometimes I think they just put that up there to keep the indians quiet...

LAST TIP: Before you press the submit button----> proof-read your entries for errors and mis-spellings and uncheck all those boxes that say "Of course I'd like to receive all your junk email". (Small price to pay for free service) Otherwise you will spend days deleting junk from your mail box. HOWEVER>>> before your delete anything....Many of the search engine sites will send you an email to confirm inquirying whether or not you are a real person. By clicking the link you are assuring them you are ( ). Make sure to do all the confirmations. It will take a period of 24 to 48 hrs. for all the confirms to come through, so watch for them.

Later...

Have a bouncey day!

For next Time: Have you signed up for Google Analytics yet??? Google Webmaster Tools??? ( No you don't have to be a real webmaster...get on it!)

[SpiderWebDev]

Step 2 Finding out what’s going on…. Page Indexing

I’m hoping that all of you that read last week’s post on website submission have since dutifully made sure your site was submitted to the site listing services. Yes it’s a pain, but once completed, it’s a good kind of pain. The last couple weeks many of you have asked for site reviews. Believe me, I flattered and I wish I had the time to do a more thorough job of it. During that process I looked at some basic things.

1.Was the site design compelling or inviting in its presentation?
2.Knowing where the company was located, could I find it with an organic search?
3.If, not why?
4.What pages were carrying their weight and which ones were problems.
5.Was there anything that quickly started bugging me? (Of course this one was very subjective and had to be tempered with “what the heck do I know?”)

When it came to specific SEO terms or keywords, I would make some suggestions, but each of you knows your market better than I or any SEO expert. So that means you need to “pay to play”. No not actually pay somebody, but you have to do the work. The brain work that is…who are my customers? Where are my customers? What do I know about “my” customers that makes them unique?

Question: How many of you have sat down and noodle these questions and actually made a list of answers? Show of hands please… hmmm? How many are afraid to answer?

That’s what I thought...

Once we have our sites up and running, it’s important not to guess at the answers above. You need cold, hard, data that only comes from 24/7 tracking. It used to be that you had to pay for expensive analytics software packages to get good info on your site traffic. But since Google started offering free analytics, I’d hate to be the Marketing Director for an analytics software company.

I know some of you have Google analytics, because I saw the page tagging code when I was doing your site checks. But more times than not those road signs were not there. So first thing, Sign up for a Google Account. It’s simple to do, just like the Site Submission; they’re just going to make sure you are you. The best way to do this is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Here’s the link:

http://www.google.co...bmasters/start/

Once you get your account, (don’t worry you don’t have to be a real webmaster) you’ll hit the Webmaster Tools Dashboard. There you’ll see where you can add your website URL to start your work. They are going to give you a little snippet of code to insert in your home page. They will include instructions on how to do this, but if you don’t feel you’re up to it. Copy and paste the code into an email and give it to your web guy (or girl). This tag will be used to verify your website to the Google spiders.



You’ll find that Google is pretty good with their instructions and processes so hopefully you shouldn’t have too much trouble with this task.

There are two ways to verify your site. One is by inserting a new meta tag in the head of your home page html code, or the simple way, is create a new page and name it with the name Google assigns you for your account and save it to the website. This is just a blank page that Google will use to identify your website.

Once you have verified your site, Google will start keeping tabs on what it finds when the Google spider crawls your website.
In the following image from the overview tab you can see a list of crawl errors and page problems that Google found. Now when you first sign up you’ll see zero problems. Ah hah! You say, I’m good…

No, that just means that you’re a newbie and Google doesn’t know the extent of your problems yet. In fact, the longer your website has been up and running the more problems you’re apt to find. Pages still up there from your first site design, a page your kids use to show Grammy’s pictures, and those pages you just forgot were even up there. So this will be a page you need to review on a regular basis, cause sh_ _ happens. When it does, you need to know about it.

Link to Webmaster Tools View

Under the Overview tab you’ll see a series of other menu links; Settings, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps and Tools. Each of these tabs has instructions for their use, so I’ll let you discover those on your own. Some will be more helpful than others, but as your knowledge of these things grows, you’ll also find you appreciate them more.

When you only have a few pages in your website it really isn’t that important to have a sitemap on your website. But it doesn’t hurt either and there are some benefits we’ll be discussing in the future. Now this isn’t just a page that you setup and list all the stuff that can be found on your site. This is a standardized format XML document that resides in the root of your web folder and directs search engine spiders on how to crawl your site. This included where they are allowed to go, and in some case, where they are not allowed to go. If this turns out to be something you guys are interested in, I’ll post an XML format file for you and you can create your own.

One of the more valuable tabs, is the Tools tab. Here you’ll find the ability to tell Google about pages you have permanently removed, create custom 404 error pages and Google Gadgets.

As you start working with the Webmaster Tools, if you have questions, please feel free to post them here, because someone else might (probably) has the same question.

Continued....

[SpiderWebDev]

Google Analytics

The first thing you want to do is set up an Adwords account. No, you don’t have to spend any money on advertising, but setting up the Adwords account first automatically links your Adwords and Google Analytics together. So in the future, if you do decide to add a PPC campaign to your marketing plan, you’ll have far better tracking data to work with. Also, The Google Analytics is not a given right, but a requested privilege. And I have found that if Google see that you might be an Adwords Advertising customer in the future, they are more apt to grant your analytics account faster.

Anyway after you have your Adwords account, follow the links to start your Analytics account. Once you request the account they usually take 2 to 3 days to confirm that you’ve been accepted. Sometimes it can be sooner, but don’t hold your breath.

Signing up for these accounts will also give you access to the various Google User forums. I know how much you guys enjoy this forum, but all of a sudden being exposed as a newbie in that world can be intimidating. Don’t worry, they treat newbies just like you do….on second thought, maybe you should worry??

After getting your new Analytics account

Just like when you opened your Webmaster Tools account, Google Analytics will have some homework for you too. Follow the links for creating the tracking code that Google will use to track information about your website.

You’ll find your tracking code under:
Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Tracking Code

This code is specific to your website and will be generated for you on the tracking code page. This code needs to be inserted at the bottom of the html code on every page in your website. I know many of you shake in fear every time someone mentions screwin’ with your page code, but this is something I think you can do. (If not call you web guy/girl and have them do this one too) It really doesn’t matter much what you use to edit your web pages practically all of them will allow you to “View Code” or “HTML View”, whatever it is for your editor you want to see all the coding stuff that makes absolutely no sense… If you don’t have an editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, VistaPrint, etc. , etc.. you can even open your page with MS Notepad and edit the code.

If any of you have trouble getting to an editable view of your web pages, post it here and we’ll figure out what’s going on. You probably won’t be alone, because I’m guessing many of you have never used that feature much. (Kind of like looking under the bed for Dust Bunnies…) Anyway, for the time being, ignore all the gobbl-dee-gook and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.

It should look something like this:


You’ll be looking for the last to closing tags. The body close tag “</body> “ and the HTML close tag “</html>”. I’m telling you to look for these two tags because depending on who did your site, what features are on the page some of you will have different snippets of code above the </body> tag. So if you just locate the last two, nothing else will matter. Insert you code in the line above the /body tag.

Like so:Inserted Tracking code

Save the page and move on to the next. See ? simple simple….
Next you’ll want to go back to your Google account and see if they have verified that they are receiving your tracking data. If it’s more than 2 or 3 days and they still aren’t receiving your tracking information. Use the Tracking Code troubleshooter pages. Most likely, when you copied your tracking code from Google, you probably missed a line in the copy and paste procedure and will need to redo the process.

Now What???

So now you have the Webmaster tools, Google analytics, and have been through the site submission process. Back to the brain work:

1.Who are my customers?
a.Age, gender, demographics
b.What pages do they find most interesting/ or spend the most time on?
c.What are the most common keywords used in organic search that brought them to me?
d.Which keywords brought them in, but then they bailed out right away? (Like “Inflatable Doll”)

2.Where are my customers?
a.What communities are finding my site
b.What communities never find my site
c.What websites are linked to my site
d.Who sends the most traffic
e.Who sends the most “Valuable” traffic. (There is a difference)

3.What do I know about “my” customers that makes them unique?

4.Which pages need work (high bailout rate)

5.What things should I do to direct traffic the way I want them to go?

6.What do I need to do to convert more visitors to customers?

So, these are the first steps to analyzing your own websites. After you start working these muscles for a while, you won’t need any one to do a site check because you and Google will be doing it every day. See how many of the questions you can honestly answer about your website. Next time we’ll be looking at identifying what should be “Your” plan for keyword selection and SEO optimization. Believe it or not it is different for every one of us. I don’t want to get into keyword specifics, that’s your business. Your keywords should be a part of your “Pocket Marketing Plan”. Those are the things that you should keep close to the vest. Anybody can list a bunch of words in the meta keywords tags. Boy that works great eh??? Soon you’ll be using fewer words and getting more traffic because you’ve done the work of targeting your marketing efforts with a rifle scope instead of a shotgun.

If you have questions about this process, post your questions here. Somebody will have the same question and get added value from you asking and hopefully from the answers. For those of you that have Google Analytics installed, have you made your list of answers?

What surprised you about your site once you started tracking?

Are you doing anything different as a result?

Looking forward to seeing what happens with this.... Did you vote today?

[SpiderWebDev]

NEWS FLASH!!!

This just in... I've been working on revamping some things on the Spider Climbing website. In the process I've been using some SEO tools that you might be interested in. Check out the "Free" tools here:

http://www.seomoz.org

You can also sign up for the Pro Tools, but that might be a bit much for some. However for $80/mo. you can have access. My recommendation is use the free tools first. You can always sign up for 1 month and cancell if you think you're ready for the Pro Stuff.

I really like the "Term Checker" tool when working on a page. Take the top 3 keywords on your keyword list and see how well your site is optimized for those terms. You can make keyword changes to a page and then run it through the term checker and it gives you a quick SEO analysis with a grade on how well you did.

Below the evaluation grade, it gives you a check list of things that are good and stuff that still needs work. Very cool, it eliminates the guess work.

In the Pro Tools, The Page Ranker Tool is also great to run after you have optimized a page. It will give you real time reports on where your page is ranked on the major search engines. But if you don't mind paging through Google and Yahoo pages manually, it's hard to justify the $80. I was actually able to move pages up in rank the same day I made the changes...it was amazing!

Good hunting!

[richs inflatables]

On the google analytics do you add the same code to every page or do you have to get a new code for every page you want on there ?

[SpiderWebDev]

On the google analytics do you add the same code to every page or do you have to get a new code for every page you want on there ?

Hi Rich,

It's the same little piece of code for everypage. What I like to do, is copy it from Google then paste to a plain text file and save it in place where you'll know how to find if needed. To make a text file just open your Accessories folder in your Start menu and select "Notepad".

Then open your website and paste into the same location in each page. It goes pretty quick. Just take a second after every paste to make sure it looks the same as what's in your Notepad file. You're not going to hurt your web page if you mess up the paste job, but Google won't see it. So just check yourself along the way...

[Chris&Arely]

Could you please help me with a question about keywords.

Does it make a difference if you have keywords for example

case 1) Face Painter, Orange County, ....

case 2) Orange County Face Painter, ....

or does google read both cases the same?

Edited by OC FUN, 02 March 2009 - 07:58 AM.

[SpiderWebDev]

Could you please help me with a question about keywords.

Does it make a difference if you have keywords for example

case 1) Face Painter, Orange County, ....

case 2) Orange County Face Painter, ....

or does google read both cases the same?

Hi OC,

With the scenario you presented the result could be the same and it would depend on the rest of your choices of keywords. But let's forget that for now... The issue you will want to consider is that in case 1. You have listed "Face Painter" and "Orange County" as two seperate terms that are seperated by a comma. In case 2. its treated as one phrase. Taken at face value, some might say there's no difference. However in local marketing, the idea for you would be to target your Keywords or Keyphrases, specific to your page. The Keyword "Orange County" on its own would be very general to your web page; obviously there could be thousands of reasons why someone would search the term Orange County. Therefore, the keyphrase "Orange County Face Painter" is very specific to your web site which would make it the stronger term.

This is a good excersize, so keep up the good work and apply this knowledge to the rest of your keyword work.

all the best,

[Jose']

Spider I must say...this is a great class. I enjoy reading and saying "Wow, he know his stuff!"

Two thumbs up...Now where do I turn in my exam?

[SpiderWebDev]

Thanks LAZ....but I thought I said no camera's in class!!!

[SpiderWebDev]

Picture Power for your Website

Hey look; you have your nice new website up on the internet, you spent tons of time getting it just so. One of your friends comes over and you say, ” Hey, check out my new website!” The friends says “cool!”, you sit down at the computer and pull up the site, and then you wait….. and wait… (Friend says, “hey that’s ok man, you got HDTV?” and starts looking for the family room.)

It’s probably no secret that the most important part about getting your images ready for the web, is getting the file size down so your pages load faster. So I definitely want to provide some ideas for that. But the more important thing about images is how they can affect the visitor experience. So let’s break this into two types of images. Graphics - those "not real life" images that you create, and Photos – real life images that are captured. I’m not going to deal to much with graphic images because those are subjective to your's or your designer's layout. However photos, real life images are quite important and the only person who can get it together for your site is you.

Your most important tool for your website is a “Good Digital Camera”. Yes I said camera, not Photoshop or Dreamweaver or any other after the fact program. You want to start collecting images from your company event experiences and use those to promote and solidify your company brand and to communicate what you do and how you do it. Most manufacturers provide the usual product detail images. These tend to be silhouette (image outlined on a white or colored background) close crop photos and are as about as sterile as you can get. They have their place on your site; usually a product detail page. If you have a location on your site where you’re giving dimensions and specifications and such, this is what those images are designed for. But they won’t sell your company. In fact, if anything they will lump you in with everybody else that uses them.

Start taking your digital camera to your events and snapping photos. Don’t bother trying to get the whole moonwalk in the frame; get in close. Get pictures of smiles, faces and activities using your product as the background. These are lifestyle images. And lifestyle images will sell your company. You have all heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. They weren’t talking about a manufacturer’s silhouette shot when they said that! You can also go online to one of the many web based commercial photo sites and chose from hundreds of professional photos you can turn into your own. These are great for creating a spirit and emotion for what it is that you do. They don’t need to have your product in them, they just need to inspire the emotion you want to communicate. Look at the image at the top of this post… That photo could be used on anybody’s website that was in the party, fun business and it took all of about 10 minutes to make. Chose an image that gets the message across visually, add your company tag line and you’re off to the races! You don't really think there's always a professional photographer around to snap that perfect smilin' kid do ya? Stock images are a great resources and for $30 or $40 you can have an image worth a $1000.

Ever think about making a real customer photo gallery? These work great on two levels. First it shows your business activity in a real setting. More importantly it will re-enforce your customer relationship. Think of that web page as your company newspaper. People love to see their photo up in lights! Take your own images for posting to get started and then make it known that you want customer photos too. Before long your customers will be providing you with "Image Testimonials" that will definately sell your company. Learning to edit these into promotional pieces does take practice. But it is a skill and skills if desired can be learned. The easiest way is to look at your favorite websites and see how they do it.

Having a good image editor is always going to be the best way to create and manage your images. But hey you say, “Photo Shop is expensive and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life learning to use it”. Correctomondo!! That’s why they came out with Photo Shop Elements and Photo Shop Express. You can download a 30 free trial of Photo Shop Elements and experiment. Most of you could probably get your whole website together during the free 30 days! No matter what editor you chose or have chosen, you need to have the capability to add text , maybe layer additional images, and most important, check and adjust file optimization.

Now for those who don’t spend every waking hour noodling with Photo Shop for fun here are few definitions:
Pixel: As in Pixie! A very small unit of measure the actual size of which is not important but knowing how many you are using per square inch of image is very important.
Aspect Ratio: In the case of a 2 dimensional object it is the ratio between an objects longest side and its shorter side. When you resize and image aspect ratio will be pretty important. Unless of course all your bounce houses are short and fat…
Constrain: Many times used when referring to our children when we actually mean restrain. In the case of images, it means to contain, or maintain, with regard to image dimensions. When resizing images you will for the most part want to “constrain the images aspect ratio”. As you make a image smaller the long side gets smaller at the same rate as the short side.

Your images are made up of thousands of tiny pixels of color. How many of those pixels you use to create your image determines how large a file it’s going to be. There is also a lot of other data in those pixels, but for our purposes it’s just important to know that an image that is 72 dpi (dots per inch also know as pixels) to going to be a whole lot smaller than an image that is 300 dpi…. and all those in between. 300 dpi images or high resolution images are what is needed for print press quality, 72 dpi would be sufficient for the web because most computer monitors are not capable of resolution better than that.

So if you do nothing else make sure you understand the relationship of image resolution to file size and whether or not your images are optimized as best as they can be. Both FrontPage and Dreamweaver have features that will show you page file size and load times under various connection speeds. Get in the habit of finding out how you're doing on that as you build your pages.

Here are a few links to Free imaging tools off the web:

http://webresizer.com/

https://www.photosho...ss/landing.html

http://www.irfanview.com/

Download a 30 day trial of Photoshop Elements here: http://www.adobe.com

Here are some good tips for web images:
1.) Don't resize the image in your page editor (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.). The result will be a small image with the same file size. Resize your images in an image editing program (Photoshop, Digital Image, Paint Shop Pro, etc.)
2.) Crop your images to remove any excess area that does not contribute to the inspirational value of the photo. (White space, too much foreground, etc.)
3.) There are many reasons to have an image be a specific size on your web page. But that doesn’t mean if it is supposed to be a large image, that it also has to be a massive file size. Here are some guidelines for image sizes relevant to websites:

Size in pixel Width x Size in Pixel Height, file size

Extremely Large 1200 x 900, 80k to 100k
Very Large 800 x 600, 60k to 80k
Large 640 x 480, 50k to 60k
Medium to Large 400 x ???, 25k to 50k
Small to Medium 300 x ???, 10k to 25k

There are a lot of websites that provide information for further study on this topic, because I am just skimming the basics. However, I hope this at least helps you rethink how you use imagery on your website. Not only is it good for business, but you'll find it may turn into one of the more fun tasks you have to do, and if done properly, can build your business and customer loyalty.

Have a bouncey day!

[mike052082]

Sorry but there shouldn't be any dry erase boards anymore. Get equipped with a Smartboard or Activboard. just a joke, I am a teacher and that is what I use on a day to day basis.

[SpiderWebDev]

Hi Mike,

It was talking to you about the new website. It'll be interesting to see what you come up with for the completed logo. The Icon is nice. Keep the font and tagline clean and it'll work great in all circumstances.

Good luck with the site!

[SpiderWebDev]

Here's some links if you're thinking about maybe trying some stock images...

www.fotosearch.com
www.GettyImages.com
www.istockphoto.com

Try a search like "childrens party" or something like that. And make sure to check the box for "Royalty Free Images"

Good hunting!

[Once Upon A Theme]

Wow spider climbing, I am in total awe. Thank you for all of your posts. This stuff is invaluable......
I just want to say thank you.

[SpiderWebDev]

Thanks OnceUponATheme,

I hope you've found the info valuable for your business and that you have much success in these tough times. I think everybody is going to need companies and people that bring some joy back into life.

All the best,

[Zman118]

Dave,

Internet Retailing 101!

Thanks for these fantastic SEO tips.

These tips are so great that I'm actually printing these out and creating a little folder so I won't lose them when these posts get buried in the future. Printing posts is not something that I do very often.

The tools that you are providing are also extremely helpful - a couple I'm aware of, but quite a few new ones that I didn't know about. I'm sure it will help me quite a lot with my website.

Again, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, for these great tips.

P.S. Hope you are successful in getting the funding you are looking for to increase your business in the future.

[SpiderWebDev]

Hi Gang,

I've had some requests for Image slideshow scripts that are easily imbedded into your web pages. Here's a link to a go site where you might be able to find a script that would work for you:

http://www.dynamicdr...ex14/index.html

I especially like the translucent slidershow... Images automatically slide in with a see-thru look and are link able to page targets. This would be a cool application when combined with a category or lifestyle element.

Just follow the copy and paste instructions and you're in business. Most of the scripts have instructions for modifying the image presentation to suit your needs.

Good Hunting!

[SpiderWebDev]

Video on the Web

I saw some posts with questions about this, so I thought I would add this link here so there's a record for future reference. Those of you who are creating video for your websites and would like to use music tracks in the opening, closing and background, do need to be mindful of copyright infringement and licensing. Google has started scanning videos with a need program that screens for copyrighted music tracks. I have first hand experience with this. They shut down all our videos until I showed proof of having the licensing agreement. Not a fun process. This scan will migrate to YouTube soon as Google now owns that company as well.

With that in mind, here's a cool link to a great resource for royalty free music tracks and video clips you can use for your videos.

http://www.digitaljuice.com/

These are professional produced music tracks of all kinds of styles and the video clips are great for spiffing up what would normally look like an amatuer production. Just register and navigate to the downloads page. Be careful though... browsing through the different music and clips can be addicting, they're really good and FREE!

Happy Hunting!