Pop Up Consoles Work – To A Point

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

As webmasters we are constantly thinking up new ways to generate sales to our sponsors however, the one medium to generating sales that has been and most likely will remain to be popular is the method of using consoles on our sites. Whether these are exit consoles, blur consoles or, on entry consoles one thing holds true, the more consoles you use, the more you annoy your surfer.

Marketing Console Numbers.

Through some research of my own i have noticed that a trend appears when the use of consoles on our sites takes effect this trend is that anything after the first console you use actually cuts your chances of making a sale in half, thus, the maximum amount of pop up consoles we should use on our sites, in my humble opinion should be two or three at the very most.

Console Sales Figures.

Okay lets take a look at some average (signups per month divided by days in the month) sales figures based on a three month period (sending roughly 10,000 hits per month).

Average signups to sponsor (A) = 113
Sales From Console (1) to sponsor (A) = 11
Sales From Console (2) to sponsor (A) = 2

The setup above uses pop up consoles in the following manner, on entering the site you get a Blur Console which hides itself behind the current page you are viewing, once you close the current page you see the blur console, once you close the blur console you see a smaller console, once you close the smaller console, the browser window closes altogether.

Evaluating The Figures.

From the above figures we can see an immediate pattern, namely that console (1) makes up roughly 10% of our total sales and also that console (2) makes up roughly 20% of console (1) sales. Putting these figures into practice across further consoles will show you that by utilizing any more than 3 consoles on your sites really does not amount to any significant raise in sales unless you send a higher amount of traffic to your sites in the first instance.

Console Sales – Recap.

We have now seen that from a steady flow of traffic over a monthly period we can influence the potency of specific consoles within our exit chains and, by analyzing the figures we get from these consoles we can almost certain figure out firstly, the correct (or comfortable) amount of consoles we use on our sites and secondly, that the more consoles we add to our sites, the lower the potential sales figures will be from each subsequent console.

I will be the first person to admit that overall pop up consoles are an excellent marketing tool however, the figures above show that the more consoles we use, the less chance we have of making a sale further down the chain, use consoles wisely and they will benefit you however, abuse the use of pop up consoles on your sites and not only will be wasting bandwidth, youll be wasting a surfer too.

Article written by Lee

European Surfers – Gold Waiting To Be Harvested

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion, Traffic | Response: 0

80% Of the internets content is English. 40% of internet surfers cant even read English, let alone understand it. Out of all the countries in the world, German internet users spend an average of 59.2 minutes looking at porn a month closely followed by Norwegian surfers who looked at it 55.4 minutes every month, how many of you have sites catering to this market? Not one of you… I would bet!

Most webmasters that I know of automatically assume, European surfers = Freeloading Bestiality Loving Sicko’s. That’s bullshit! In fact, a larger and larger percentage of European surfers are looking for porn. Sure, they can find it by the bucket load but, lets be honest, Herman from Munich who cant speak a word of English is going to be making a lot more from this industry than Jason in Miami.. WHY? Because Herman has a captive audience, most of his surfers are German speaking after all, that’s the language he makes his sites in, that’s the language of the sponsors he uses and, like it or not, German surfers are proven to be avid porn surfers and, more importantly, Credit Card spenders!
But Wait…

Hang on a second, Credit Card spenders? But I thought the best way of milking $$$ out of foreign surfers was to send them off to a dialer program? hmmm…. perhaps I’m missing something??

You are! there are a lot of sponsors that don’t have any sites in English, Germany has a load of high converting AVS sites, why is this? Because they are written completely in German, Spain has a lot of good quality sponsor that work wonders, Why? Again because they are written in Spanish.

You have a lot of AVS, TGP and free sites that don’t make as much as they could, WHY? because you haven’t considered the global market! Let’s be honest here, the big sponsors of this world you use, how many of them say in their terms and conditions, they don’t allow access to German, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian surfers? Ill bet at least 50% or more of them right? that’s money you have just lost! Sure, you can ship them off to a dialer program and hope they download it, most wont, sure you can send them to an opt-in email program and hope to make some money from them long term, you wont, In fact, European surfers detest having to give any information about them out. Its a privacy thing, they don’t want you to know who they are, so you cant tell their governments who they are, it sounds harsh but, its true.

So How Do I Do It??

The best way to milk money from the European surfers is to treat them EXACTLY the same as American surfers, but, with one major difference… You need to build for their language, get this right and you’ll be laughing all the way to the Bundesbank

But, where do you start, how can you build a site in a language you know nothing about? Simple, do some research, there are places out there that cater to European based webmasters, go to the forums, ask for help, you wont be laughed at, you wont be ridiculed and, who knows, you may just learn something in the process!

Sign up to a foreign sponsor, you can find a lot on our site, most of, if not all of these foreign sponsor will gladly help you out, they have email support in a variety of languages themselves, drop them a line, tell them you need help, Ask for it… It will come.

Now you have the help you need what next? use it, ask everyday if you have to, there are some good translation services available on the net, spend $50 to get an existing site you have that’s working well translated into a foreign language, I guarantee you, its money well spent! Once you have this translated ‘template’ site use it time and time again, tweak it until you find the best converting site you can, submit it to all the foreign search engines around, you’ll soon pick up that its not much different to working your ‘standard’ sites except, you’ll have trapped a larger percentage of internet porn surfers and, what’s more, this is a percentage that YOUR competitors wont have!

Integration..

Is it possible to build foreign sites and English site to work together? YES but, its hard, you have to mimic the responses you have learnt from the trial you did with the first translated site, once you start to see trends happening, build on them, if something doesn’t work, swap it out, put something in its place, even if.. Its a US sponsor. You have the framework, the surfer is in your site, they know what its about, that’s the time to start introducing the foreign (to them) sponsors ads.

The Results..

The results of your trial will speak for themselves, you will have tapped into an as yet untamed market, You will have more scope of growth for your business, You will have established a new traffic source, You will be able to reap the benefits. Of course, you need to work for it, don’t expect magic overnight, it just isn’t gonna happen! Remember when you first started webmastering? it was hard work, tapping into the European market is even harder, its like starting all over again from scratch then, realizing you know what your doing but you have been doing it wrong all these years.

Article written by Lee

Designing Your Site With Link Popularity In Mind

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic, WebDesign | Response: 0

To get good traffic, your website needs to be popular, to be popular, your website needs links, to get links, your website needs to be popular. Annoying isn’t it

Almost everyone agrees that link popularity is critical for your website’s visibility, traffic, and thus successfulness. It is something you need to have. As I pondered the ways of establishing and improving one’s “popularity”, eventually all come back to one central issue, your website must be designed to be popular.

Link popularity is a basically the measure of links pointing to your website and is meant to be a measure of the best websites. Theoretically those websites that have the most links pointing to them must be important and thus worth the visit. Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks out there that have created programs to “boost” your popularity artificially and all they have done is create Spam and muddy the overall picture. The search engines and directories are keeping a close eye on these programs.

Design: When getting a request or thinking about making one for a link exchange with a website, look thoroughly over the website first. The website’s theme or topic and general layout is the first thing to look at. Sites with themes or topics that are related to or compliment yours should be your main link partners. You do this to get targeted traffic.

Just as you evaluated someone’s website, others will be doing the same to yours. Make sure you know what your theme or topic is and that it clearly encompasses the whole website. Stay focused; do not try to cover everything.

Next, check out the links page or resource area. If they do have one, is it easy to find within the site? Does it seem to be part of the site or just a page off to the side? Are their linking rules available, clear, and easy to follow? Do they accept links from any website or are they choosy? Being part of someone’s well constructed links program, no mater what size, can be a very beneficial thing indeed.

Again, the same goes for your website. You want to let other webmasters know that you want to exchange links and which type of website you will accept requests from. Make it easy for others to link with you.

The last set of questions to ask yourself about any website is:

Is it easy to navigate
Does it have too many graphics (slow loading)
Is it pleasant to the eye
Does the information seem to be organized in a logical fashion

What has been covered so far deals with what the visitors see; if visiting the website is a pleasant experience then people will stay and look and possibly come back. The final area to cover is what the search engines see.

The underside (the source code) of the website is just as critical when designing or linking with a website. The search engines are the ones that read this and if it is not done properly then the website can not succeed. Below are a few things you need to consider in your source code and any potential site that has asked to be linked by you.

Does the website contain frames
Does it use the headers, titles, meta-tags, and alt tags properly
Do the keyword location(s) and density seem appropriate and “optimized”

The latter two issues mentioned above are critical, for they are the backbone to traffic production.

Content: The information you have is just as important as how you set it up on your website. The more popular websites or the ones with good link popularity are those that have valuable information or resource(s) for its audience after all, they fill a niche! People will visit, stay, return, and recommend a website if it has the content they want or need.

“Content is king.” A well-designed and organized website might look good but if it does not deliver anything of value, it will not be successful. Whatever subject matter you have on your site, make sure you have something of interest and importance to add to the subject, if you do and you promote it well, you and your site will be successful. In this context, it (content) does not just refer to images, why not add some stories or interesting links to news articles to improve your sites ‘popularity’.

In addition to information, resources like mailing lists, surveys, polls, classified ads, forums, etc. are all things if used appropriately can add value and fresh content to your website which, in turn will assist you in interacting with your sites visitors.

In conclusion: Take the time to design and optimize your website properly for the search engines. Make sure you have something of value or importance to add to whatever area your website is in. Provide resources and other tools, which your visitors could use and will make them come back. Be proactive and interact with your visitors. Websites that are dynamic and active are the best ones. All of this might take a little more time to get your website up and running, but it will be worth it.

For yours or any website to be popular, it needs the links and to get the links, it needs to show the other webmasters that it is worthy of a link. It seems everyone today has a website, but not everyone has put together a website that adds value to the Internet community. Take a critical look at your website and any website you might link to and ask yourself…………….

Would you bookmark it?

Article written by Lee

The Next Big Traffic Craze – Thumbnail Link Lists

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Link Lists | Response: 0

As adult webmasters are constantly thriving to create the next craze in traffic sources to garner sales from their sites it comes as no surprise that there is already talk amongst the ranks of the next big thing, what is this new idea? The Thumbnail Link List.

Thumbnail Link Lists – Re-Inventing The Wheel.

As the past year and a half have taught us as webmasters, regular TGP’s have almost become a thing of the past with more and more thumbnail TGP’s being created and submitted to daily, why then, has it taken so long for someone to think up the idea of the Thumbnail Link List? Quite simply I think it has been a case of to much has happened over the last 12 months in the adult industry for webmasters to think this idea up.

So What Is A Thumbnail Link List?

A thumbnail link list is in effect a way of displaying free sites on your own standard Link List by utilizing small thumbnail samples of the images contained within the free sites galleries, in fact, much the same way that a thumbnail TGP works however, instead of only listing single image galleries your link list will consist of links to individual free sites.

Much like the Thumbnail TGP traffic source, the thinking behind the Thumbnail Link List is that by showing your surfers what type of pictures the sites within your link list contain they will be more likely to visit the free site thus improving your CTR to your webmaster submitted sites and, ultimately, your site overall allowing you to manipulate the traffic to garner more sales for yourself as the Thumbnail Link List owner.

Submitting Your Site To A Thumbnail Link List.

Looking at the Thumbnail Link List idea from a webmaster who would be submitting your free sites for listing (and ultimately traffic) how do the rules of the Thumbnail Link List differ to that of the regular link list which we are all used to seeing, well for a start, the main difference will be that you either need to submit a thumbnail yourself or, enter the url to one of your gallery pages in addition to the main entrance to your free site, this will actually be the only significant change in how you operate your link list submissions compared tot he current link list method, however, as each Thumbnail Link List owner will have their own individual rules you should check before submitting as to what is required from you as a submitter.

Thumbnail Link Lists – Overview.

The whole Thumbnail Link List idea is one that, in all seriousness should mean more traffic not only for the submitters of the free sites but, also for the Thumbnail Link List owner themselves, by offering the surfers a preview of the content contained within the free sites they will be visiting they can simply reduce the amount of sites that do not appeal to them and focus more on the sites that do meaning that the webmasters who submit highly niched free sites to the links lists will now be able to benefit from a larger traffic base and ultimately, more sales.

Article written by Lee

The Curse Of The Broken Image

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

At one time or another we have all done it, uploaded a new site only to find out that when we view the page in our browser one of the images are broken because we either didn’t link it properly or the filename wasn’t named correctly on our server.

We may think that this is a bad thing however, recent experimentation on my part has found quite the opposite.

We all search for new ways of getting the surfer to visit our sponsors in order to have them buy a membership and earn us a nice little slice of $$$ in the process but, what methods could we use that quite simply are overlooked?

One such method is that of utilizing broken images, lets be honest here, no-one wants broken image son their site, it makes the site look unprofessional but, lets think about this, on a page full of banners and graphics all nested together neatly on an FPA (Full Page Ad) what’s more likely to grab the surfers attention, a completely loaded heavy bandwidth graphic or a single solitary broken image placed in a such a spot the surfer actually notices it?

Makes you think doesn’t it. Our recent testing of this method has actually shown that our CTR (Click Through Ratio) rose slightly on a couple of sponsors we used this method on all of the sites in question had nice looking text and banners with corresponding thumbnails leading tot he full size image but, upon deliberately leaving an image off the server thus resulting in the ‘appearance’ of an erroneous broken graphic the spot where that image should have been was were a great deal of our click throughs came from.

I am not saying you should immediately go and delete all graphics from you pages but, a single, well placed broken image on a free site can work wonders in getting traffic off your site and to your sponsors pay site tour which ultimately, is what we want to happen at the EARLIEST possible time.

Article written by Lee

Masters Of Discipline – Have You Got What It Takes?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

So you want to throw in your day job and become a full time adult Webmaster? Well yeah, I can hear you saying, “Who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by pictures of beautiful women all day, make up their own hours, and be the master of their own destiny?” It just sounds sooo good when it’s put like that doesn’t it?

Before you tell your boss you quit, you might want to read this article first, as the reality of working in this industry and especially for yourself can be a real wake up call for many.

The main thing you need to succeed in this business is discipline, and lots of it. If there are temptations when you work for someone else to slack off, take a sick day, or simply not bother showing up, then you can double those temptations when you work for yourself.

It’s so easy to roll over in the morning rather than get out of bed, stagger to the PC, and actually work.

It’s so easy to decide to take the day off when the sun is shining and the beach is calling. You simply tell yourself you’ll make up for it tonight, and then find yourself coming home at 3am.

It’s so easy to not actually work, when you work for yourself, that at times it can be unreal.

The reality of doing any of the above is longer nights, less sleep, and almost inevitably smaller paychecks.

Structure Your Day.

The answer to this problem is to really think about your working day and give it some structure, just as you would if you worked for someone else. Work set hours and take frequent breaks. When you work for someone else they make you take breaks for a variety of reasons, but mostly, because as research has proved, you’ll be more productive after one. It’s also important to make sure others know your hours as well, and always remember to add what time zone you are located in on any correspondence. There is nothing worse than being awoken by an associate at 3am because you forgot that little detail!

Set A Routine.

Get into a routine! There are various tasks that must be done each week no mater how boring. By creating a work routine, you can control your time and structure the more boring jobs at the end of the day when for most our creativity levels are less. You can also structure that routine as I do, when I’ve finished those boring tasks at the end of each day, I reward myself with some time doing what I want to do.

Going Solo.

This can be a lonely business and if you don’t like working alone then maybe it’s not the right one for you. You’ll likely spend many hours in your own company and as someone else pointed out to me, while boards and instant messengers are great, they can also eat heavily into your working time if you’re not careful. Personally, I use the boards and chats as a treat when I’ve accomplished a goal, unless I need to talk to someone in order to get that set goal done.

If, like me, your office is in your home, in reality you never really leave work. It’s just always there and there is always something else to be done, and it’s so tempting just to work a few more hours. Having the discipline to stick to your office hours is the trick and where structure comes into play. The saying all work and no play makes Jack/Jill a dull boy/girl is really true here.

The biggest trick of all though, is learning to recognize your limits. Set them and stick to them. Unlike in the normal workplace, you won’t have the big cheese or even the little one watching over your shoulder, making sure you work or making sure that your paycheck and your bills are covered each week. That’s up to you now.

Think Before You Leap.

Another thing you need to consider is can you REALLY afford to give up your day job? Working for someone else means that for the most part you will have a reliable pay check each week or month, when you work for yourself you loose that security. There are other things to consider as well like health insurance, book keeping and how exactly you are going to pay for them. Of course if there is another bread winner in the house this may not be of such a concern, but it’s still something you should consider before you give in your slip. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re considering going it alone, don’t, at least not until you have enough cash saved to cover any outgoings you might have over a six months period.

How well do you know the law? If you think the law doesn’t affect you because your just one person working from home then think again. If you don’t know your Title 18 USC 2257 from your arse then you may be heading for trouble. Standing in front of a judge and saying I didn’t know won’t get you out of a heavy fine or even a prison sentence.

The real questions you need to ask yourself now are you up to the challenge, and do you have the personal discipline to make this work for you?

Article written by Jenne.

http://www.clitical.com.

Promo Material – Make The Most Of Your Marketing

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

Personality Plus

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

I have been selling to the gay market now for 5 years. And one trend I have noticed that works best in ANY marketing attempt is to make it personal as possible. Now this is true in any marketing venue; however, the same tactics of Personality I have used in the straight market were not enough for the gay market.

The gay market is better served when the surfer BELIEVES, not just feels, you know him and know what he wants. This goes back to my previous comments on knowing your niche.

I really believe that the “1 to 1 dialogue” you can have with your surfers is more important than just high traffic averages when making sales. Giving him the sense that he matters to you, a sense of community, a sense that you are here just for him is all accomplished by adding your own personality to your work.

In many avenues I have said “talk to the surfer”. I have said it so much you are all probably sick of hearing it. But it WORKS. With many of my straight sites, I attempt to speak quickly and to the point, because while I know straight people I don’t know what is going to fly all the time. In those cases, though, instead of saying, “Click Here for Great Sex Sites” I will probably phrase it as “The best site on the net and Cheaper than a six pack of beer”. Am I being heterophobic with my lack of enthusiasm? Maybe. It is how I approach it and it does work.

On my side of the fence, I would talk the talk, differently. While the basics remain the same, “talk to the surfer”, I approach it in a more personal manner… Again, instead of using “Click Here”, I would go with “Hmm, Hmm … I followed this yummy thing to Absolutely Male. I have to tell you, I had more fun here than anywhere else on the net. Made my toes curl and then some…” Enough of that now, huh? = )

I do not stop at just the marketing. I do the same thing when it comes to the body of my sites. I will add statements that include a recent trip to the local gay watering hole, the men I saw on the beach, my own experience with a man in uniform, and so on depending on the theme of the site. And, yes since I’m not a total sex fiend, I do make things up as I go along ; )

Recently, I have received letters from webmaster who have worked the personality approach. They have found a lot of success. However their bigger complaint was they now had a lot more bookmarkers than before. That’s great, as far as I’m concerned. This means they have been to glean a following of loyal surfers. And if you can work it, it is that loyalty that can make a HUGE difference. I think I will save how to work that loyalty factor for a future article or post.

The gay adult net has gone full circle. In the beginning, personality was the KEY to success. Then we followed suit with most of the adult web and moved away from it to a “here’s some porn now buy something” attitude. Right now, when the going seems to be getting tough, our surfers are looking for the exact thing that made us different to begin personality and community.

Article written by Gary-Alan

Tips For Submitting To TGP’s

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the most popular ways for getting traffic to sites these days is to submit galleries to TGP’s and because it is so popular there is a lot of competition for getting listed. If you like, it is a buyer’s (TGP’s) market, with the supply of galleries exceeding the demand. For example, at Richard’s Realm we only list about 60% of the galleries submitted and that’s after we’ve filtered out unwanted free hosts, free email addresses and submission bots. If we didn’t do that we would be listing about 20%-30% of all submissions.

Before you begin

Submitting to TGP’s is a numbers game. It’s all about volume and percentages. The amount of money your gallery generates can be estimated using a formula with 4 elements:

Total Hits To Gallery X Click Through Ratio X Signup Ratio X $ Per Signup = Total Revenue

So, for example, 1 in 25 surfers to your gallery clicks on a banner or a link, you use a sponsor paying $30 a signup and you have a 1:400 signup ratio with them from your TGP traffic. The formula then becomes:

Total Hits To Gallery X 4% X 0.25% X $30 = Total Revenue

You can see now that the only thing remaining that will affect your Total Revenue is the Total Hits To Gallery. If you increase the Total Hits To Gallery the Total Revenue will also increase.

Of course, experienced TGP submitters also know that you can work on improving the other elements of the formula to improve Total Revenue. They tweak their galleries and change banner and link placement to maximize the Click Through Ratio. If it is improved and rises from 1 in 25 (4%) to 1 in 20 (5%), their Total Revenue increases overall by 20%.

Building the gallery

Examine the formula above and you will see that two elements can be manipulated at the gallery building stage: Click Through Ratio and Signup Ratio.

It is always said, and surprisingly often overlooked, but select a sponsor for a gallery which complements the gallery’s content. For example, if you build a big tits gallery use a big tits sponsor. With more and more TGP’s becoming categorized people surfing the big tits category will be looking for bit tits and are more likely to be interested in a big tits sponsor!

In addition, be sure to use sponsors which are not overly-used, sponsors which are little known. If you go through a TGP you will see the same sponsors and banners showing up all the time. If a surfer sees a banner 10 times they are only going to click on it the once. So even if you build the perfect gallery with top notch banner placement and pictures, if the surfer clicked on the same banner on the previous gallery they’re not going to click on yours!

Selecting TGP’s

There are hundreds of TGP’s you can submit to. It is usually advantageous to select TGP’s that only post your type of gallery, as well as the more generic ones. For example, submit to TGP’s which only list big tit galleries or galleries with one-legged midget lesbians (if that’s your niche). The more targeted traffic will usually result in better click-through ratios and better signups, especially if you’re using a new or little-known sponsor for the particular niche.

TGP’s with a moderate level of traffic that send a few hundred hits tend to be quite good. Admittedly, to get any real volume you need to submit to quite a few, but consider using TGSW to do the bulk of it. My reasoning for using the smaller TGP’s is that they tend to list fewer pages and the surfers tend to be less “professional” and adept at dodging banners.

Submitting your gallery

There are no real tricks to this bit, but it is very important to remember that TGP’s usually get far more submissions than they need or want. You must try your best not to give them a reason to reject your gallery:

• Read the rules carefully and follow them. The TGP webmaster doesn’t put them there for fun and if you break them it’s possible you will be blacklisted.
• Look at the galleries already listed on the TGP to get some idea of what the webmaster likes.
• Don’t try to be smart and use different names and email addresses to avoid the per webmaster submission limits. Although galleries can look very different, reviewers have a good memory and can often recognize designs, layouts and descriptions. If they spot you trying to cheat you’ll probably end up getting blacklisted.
• Take a look at their TGP and see what kind of description they like, Adult Buffet have very different descriptions to Richards-Realm. This might not determine whether or not you get listed, but it’s a chance to get a good description of your choice and, hopefully, more hits.
• Select the right category for your gallery. If you submit your gallery to the “Teens” category and it should be in the “Mature Women” category it will get put there or rejected. If you get the gallery listed in the wrong category you may get more hits, but if a surfer is expecting a nice young lady in the pictures he’s just going to hit his back button and look at the next gallery in the list – probably not even giving your banners a chance to load.

Monitoring your gallery

Once you’ve submitted your gallery you should keep an eye on how it performs. View the stats to see who listed you, how many hits they sent and how much you made from the gallery. It is even worthwhile to create galleries dedicated to specific TGP’s, so you can monitor their performance even more closely. If a TGP sends lots of hits but no signups it’s probably worth no longer submitting to them or changing the gallery to see if you can improve the click throughs or signups. Compare before and after stats if you make changes in the gallery layout or sponsor to see if they’re working.

Whatever you do keep tweaking and monitoring your galleries to get the best possible performance for each of the elements in the revenue formula.

Article written by Richard

Adding Images To Your Web Pages

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

The Basics

Adding Images To Your Web Pages – The Basics.

So you have just got into the online adult business but don’t know your ass from your elbow, you have the simplistic stuff relating to HTML down but, you want to find out how you can start adding banners and images to your pages here is a quick guide to help you on your way.

What Is An Image?

The answer, is, believe it or not simple, An image is a picture on a page of your website. There are however, many way to display images on your site from the size of it to the overall effect you want the image to have on your HTML page and from borders around the image and many other things.

However, I don’t want to blind you with information at the moment considering you need to actually know the basics of adding images before you can start using fancy styles and the likes.

Adding A Basic Image.

The HTML code to add an image on any HTML based page is a straight forward one however, before you can use this HTML tag you need to know where on your page you want the image to appear.

Now that you have decided where you want your image to display you need to use the image tag, the HTML coding to place an image on your page should be IMG. Also, you will need to tell your page where you want the image to come from or, in other words, you need to tell it the source of the image you want to use the HTML tag to do this is SRC.

For example, lets say you have an image called porn.gif (you need to include the extension in your SRC coding) you would display this image on your page using the following code:

<IMG SRC=”porn.gif”>

Simple huh?

Well, actually, maybe not, for example, what do you put if the images you are linking to is NOT in the same location as the page you want it to appear on? That’s not a problem, all you need to do is use the FULL location of the image in your IMG HTML tag like this:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif”>

You should now be able to include images on your pages without any problems.

Image Sizes.

Ok we can now include an image on our pages but, what if we want to make this image fit the feel of the rest of our page / site, how do you manipulate the graphic to ‘look’ right?

There are a number of ways images can be manipulated for example, if you want the image to be 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels high you can add the WIDTH and the HEIGHT tag to your HTML coding like this:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″>

That will now resize your image into a square that is 100 pixels wide and high.

Now we have the image on our page in the right size we require what else can we do with it? Read on..

Borders + Colors.

In addition to placing the image and resizing the image on our pages we can also add a border and, a border color to the mage to make it stand out if needed for example:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″ BORDER=”2″ BORDERCOLOR=”FF0000″>

As you can see we have now added the two tags ‘BORDER’ and ‘BORDERCOLOR’. The first ‘BORDER’ tag tells your HTML what size of border you want around your image and, this can be any size you want to make the image stand out on your page. The second ‘BORDERCOLOR’ tag tells your HTML code what color you want the border to be again, this can be any color you like to match the rest of your sites pages.

Linking An Image.

In addition to resizing, adding borders and colors we can also link our image to a specific URL (the most common form of this is with banner advertising) and, if you want to link your image to a URL you would use the following coding:

<A HREF=”http://www.sponsorsurl.com”><IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” BORDER=”2″ WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″ BORDERCOLOR=”FF0000″>

This will create an image that is 100×100 pixels in size, with a border size of 2 pixels in the color FF0000 that is linked to http://www.sponsorsurl.com

Also, the order of the HTML tags we use is not important however, you should try to get used to arranging them in a certain way to make your work easier if it ever comes to editing your images.

Hopefully this has been of use to you and you can now see that adding banners and images to your sites isn’t as daunting as you first thought.

Article written by Lee.