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Spice Up Your Web Site With Rotating Images
by Herman Drost ©Copyright 2004

Normally I don't like moving objects when I arrive at a web site. 
It distracts visitors from getting to the content. However, many 
web sites could enhance their visitor's experience by creating 
rotating images on the home page. Here's a good example:

http://www.omelettechef.com

Let's look at some of the benefits of rotating images:

1. Visitors don't need to drill down to the internal pages of 
your web site to find your images. All your images can be placed 
on the home page for easy viewing.

2. "Pictures are worth a thousand words" - If the rotating images 
are high quality and provide an overview of your best products, 
they give your visitor a better impression than trying to say it 
with words.

3. Timing of rotations, can be adjusted - with this script, you 
can speed up or slow down the viewing sequence of your images.

4. Show many images - you can insert as many images as you need, 
although I would suggest showing only the best ones, because 
Internet Users tend to be impatient and won't spend more than a 
few seconds on your web page.

5. Automatic rotation - when someone visits your site, the 
images will rotate automatically like a slide show, thus adding 
to the interactivity of your web site.

How to Install the Image Rotation Script

1. Copy the image rotation script from:
http://simplythebest.net/info/dhtmlscript66.html and paste it 
into the head and body tags of your web page.

2. Set up the viewing order of your images and number them
accordingly i.e. 1.gif, 2.gif, 3.gif etc. (Give each image a 
number, not a name like danish.gif...it will only produce 
errors).

3. Optimize your images - reduce the resolution of each of your 
images to 72ppi to make them suitable for the web. Large images 
will slow down the loading of your web page.

4. Change the time interval between rotations - I set mine to 3 
seconds instead of the 5 seconds provided by the script. This 
allows the images to be seen quickly enough to keep your 
visitor's attention.

5. Insert the first image of your slide show on the page and 
place a link to the URL of your web page.

6. Save and upload the images and web page to your server
(web host).

7. Check your script - view your web page online to confirm
that everything is working correctly.

Optimize Your Web Page for the Search Engines.

This script places a lot of javascript code in the header tags 
of your web page, thus pushing your text further down the page. 
Search engines tend to first spider the top portion of the code 
in your web page. Therefore it is imperative to reduce the 
amount of code on the page, especially in the header tags.

Here is how to do this:

1. Place the javascript code in an external file - copy and 
paste the code (remove the beginning and end script tags) in a 
text file, name it something like my.js and save it. This will 
reduce the code to just one line.

2. Insert the external file between the header tags of your web 
page. 

<header> <script language="JavaScript"
src="home.js"></script> </header> (remove the periods
in the code for the script to work).

3. Upload your my.js file and web page to the server.

That's it!

Web Copy Tip
Search engines will only spider text (not images).
Therefore, near the top of your web page, create an optimized 
paragraph of text before the rotating images. Place your most 
highly targeted keywords in this paragraph and also include 
these keywords in the title and description tags of your meta 
tags. This will increase your chances of getting good rankings 
in the main search engines, thus attracting free traffic to your 
web site.

Resources
Image Rotation Scripts
http://simplythebest.net/scripts/DHTML_scripts/dhtml_images.html
http://javascript.internet.com/miscellaneous/random-image-rotator.html

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and 
author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com, Affordable Web Site Design 
and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter 
for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. 
You can read more of his in-depth articles at: 
http://www.isitebuild.com/articles 
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