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:
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. 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 i.e.
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) near the top of your web page, therefore 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
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
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