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Over The Rainbow
So why is the gay community over the rainbow? As promised today I’ll finish up on the symbols that are prevalent in the gay community. Last week I mention the Pink Triangle and it’s political emergence. And technically, the rainbow flag has a similar political beginning.
I always love answering a question with another question (it is one of those annoying habits I have). So, when I am asked the “what does the rainbow flag stand for?” I look forward to the response when I ask, in turn, “what do YOU think it means?” Here are my top three favorite answers:
1 – “It’s colorful and gay people like colors.”
2 – “It’s a dance party thing”
3 – “Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow you guys loved her a lot.” (This has to be my all time favorite.)
Well like any political symbol, it is a way to distinguish ourselves. But this time we look not to a place in history but we look at the world in general. No matter where you are, whether it is on 8th street in NYC or Rue du Champe in Paris, there will be a gay person somewhere. Now, some may argue that not all cultures and societies will have homosexual present. And I say, “BULL”. They are just in the closet somewhere.
So in essence, gay men and women cross every racial and religious culture around the world. We come in all shapes, sizes and colors. So what better symbol to show that with than a rainbow, all colors coming together as one – as one community. No matter how culturally diverse our world is, the gay community is made up from a piece of each.
The rainbow flag and the uses of the rainbow, in the gay community, are diverse. If you see it flying outside on a restaurant wall, and it means it is a gay or gay friendly establishment. See a set of rainbow rings around a friend’s neck, it’s gay fashion accessories. And see a political march with rainbows on posters and flags, it’s a gay assembly.
Last week I insinuated that the pink triangle was not a symbol to over use in design. Well, in my opinion, the opposite is true with the rainbow and the rainbow flag. I am NOT saying run out and re do all your sites with rainbow backgrounds. No! But, I am saying that the nature of this political symbol is somewhat more flexible. We ourselves took the rainbow and made jewelry, publications, tee shirts and such. And just as the pink triangle, the rainbow will say that it’s ok to be here, you have friends inside or you have nothing to worry about here – be yourself, this place is for you.
So what have we learned? What some people think as silly symbols that gay people use, actually have an origin – and, a potent origin at that. I still ask, for your own good, that you use them wisely and not over do it. The more you throw symbols around willy-nilly, the more people will think you do not know what you are doing. And the more that the surfers thinks that, the less likely you are to make the sale and get your business to grow.
Article written by Gary-Alan
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Community Forum Scripts
Whether you have little or much traffic one thing that will enable you to benefit greater form this traffic is giving your surfers the sense that they are part of a ‘community’ much like the message boards built around adult webmasters have the feel of a community to them your surfers will end up staying around a lot longer if you can give them a reason to come back to your site over anyone else’s.
That said, one of the main factors in starting your own little porn community is the need to have a place where all the ‘action’ take place. What better way than you own message forum.
However, we hit our first problem, having never thought about starting a forum up before you wouldn’t know where to go to look for scripts or, what the best one is. That’s the reason behind this little guide.
Below you will find a short breakdown of the more commonly used message forum scripts along with a short list of features each one has to offer you when choosing to build your own online community.
VBulletin http://www.vbulletin.com
This is actually quite a good forum script, most of the main forums on the web use either VBulletin or PhpBB when it comes to threaded forums. VBulletin uses MySQL and .php to run the actual forum and, set-up of it can become a little tricky if you want to customize it to your exact needs and color scheme. That said, once you overcome the initial complications in setting the forum script up it is easy to handle and, with a price tag of only $160.00 its an affordable option for many.
Ultimate Bulletin Board http://www.infopop.com
Unlike VBulletin UBB uses Perl programming for the forum script which, means you can install it on any cgi enabled host. However, the one main drawback with this script is that it uses flat text files to store all the data which, can sometimes bog down your server with unnecessary file calls. The cost of $199.00 however can be a bit to expensive for most webmasters.
Ikon Board http://www.ikonboard.com
Ikon board is a nice little threaded forum script and, the fact that it is free to download makes it even more so however, even though it uses MySQL for the backend or, choose to store your data in flat text files this script just seems a little to ‘basic’ looking for my personal taste. That said, there are many types of site using IkonBoard so the script must be good enough for them to be using it. Then again, maybe its the price tag of $0.00 that has made this a popular choice.
PhpBB http://www.phpbb.com
PhpBB is probably the most well known free forum script on the web today, its easy to customize (within reason) supports php and MySQL functions yet seems to offer nothing in return. The basics of a forum are there however, every webmaster and their closest friend seems to be using this script. The whole idea of building up a community is so that your site can stand out from the crowd, in my humble opinion, the script does what it is supposed to but, it doesn’t offer any redeeming qualities to your site.
Site Net BBS http://www.focalmedia.net
Sitenet BBS, formally known as Netboard, is probably one of the better Perl based forum scripts on the market, it price tag of $69.00 makes it an affordable choice for almost everyone and, the installation process itself is VERY simple to understand. The one drawback that i have found with this forum script however is that it stores the data in flat text file which actually slow the server down quite a lot making connections to the forum time-out on numerous occasions. However customization of the script is very easy using only HTML based templates you do not need any additional programming skills and, it has a nice interface with a few good features. For the price it is well worth a look. They also offer a freeware version however the links on the bottom of the forum become annoying after a while.
In summary there are a lot of popular forum scripts available for webmasters to start using some are free other require payment ALL have a range of different functions available in them.
Before looking at installing any of the scripts you should always try a demo first to see which one has the features and benefits you would like to offer your community members.
If you can get your base community built up on a forum they enjoy using then all the rest of your marketing should pay off in dividends long term.
Article written by Lee.
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Redirecting Questionable Adult Traffic
The one thing almost all reputable adult webmasters agree on is that one way or the other, we want to rid the net of those webmasters that profit from traffic primarily gained from either the direct promotion of or, targeting of, keywords relating to child pornography however, how can you tell what traffic you are being sent and, more importantly, how can you do something about the type of traffic that you receive to your site in order to filter out this unwanted traffic? The answer is simple, use a script to redirect the traffic elsewhere before it even hits your site.
Child Porn Redirection Php Script.
The following php script when used on your server will enable you to send unwanted traffic gained by the promotion of using ‘illegal’ keywords in the search engines and sites which link to your own.
<!– Start Copy Here –>
<?
// Redirect “Lolita” traffic
$refer_full_path = “$HTTP_REFERER”.”$PATH_INFO”;
if(( preg_match(“/lolita/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/child/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/preteen/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/pre-teen/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/pedo/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/underage/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/beast/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/rape/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/kinder/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/incest/i”, $refer_full_path)) ||
( preg_match(“/kiddie/i”, $refer_full_path))) {header(“Location: $refer_full_path”);
exit;
}?>
<?
$words=array(“childporn”,”underage”,”beast”,”interracial”,”lolita”,”preteen”);
for($i=0;$i<count($words);$i++){
if(eregi($words[$i],$HTTP_REFERER)){
header(“Location: http://www.fbi.gov/?CHILD_PORN_ON_DISK_LOGGED_AND_REPORTED”);
}
}
?><!– End Copy Here –>
In order to use this script, simply add additional keywords or partial word matches to the top part of the script and, include the bottom half of the script at the top of your HTML coding.
Any traffic being sent to your site via keywords which you have specifically told the script not to allow access to your web site will be forwarded to the url in the bottom part of the php script which again, can be changed to wherever you like.
Article written by Lee
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Getting Webmaster Traffic To Your Design Site
Just starting in the design biz? Well you’re going to need some traffic to your design work. You need to get your name out to as many people as humanly possible. If you don’t have the contacts, then you don’t have the work. Network, communicate, and setup your portfolio. These are the 3 most important steps when starting your design company, preceding these three steps are advertising and demonstrating.
When I first started designing, I had no clue what I was doing except for designing websites. I knew I needed clients, but had no idea where to start. I met up with a ouple of other webmasters one night. I told them I had just started and was looking for some work. They took me in and taught me the trade. They showed me a few tricks in how to design things much quicker, and also subconsciously taught me to make sure as many people as possible see my work, and that they know who its from.
I worked with my friends for a few months when things started to get slow, so I took it upon myself to start my own company. I still got outsourced work from them, but now was taking on my own clients, but I had forgotten one important step. Advertising, the biggest step to forget. So I started posting on message boards to get my name in the dirt. I received a few clients, but nothing large. Then one day out of the blue a man came to me and wanted 4 pay sites designed. Wow, a real client at last. He said he saw my posts on a resource forum and decided to use me for his work.
I worked for this client for about 2 months, and more and more people were coming to me. I had been doing something good, but work started to slow and finally I realized I had been working for the same few clients and had not been getting anyone else in the door. Maybe board posting wasn’t enough? Exactly, its not, I asked around to see what I could do I had gotten a few suggestions like banner trades, recip’s, work for advertising. So I did them all. And soon enough I had more clients than I could shake a stick at.
Network.
Talk to people, people that are in the biz. Webmasters and designers. Talk to anyone you possibly can that could further spread your name of even bring work to you. If you do not network, then don’t plan on anything coming your way.Communicate.
Get on boards, ICQ, AIM, MSN, whatever. Just make sure that people see you and know you are there. Send them emails with different offers, not spam, but personal emails. Take it upon yourself to try and get your name into the field.Portfolio.
If you do not have one of these, then you might as well try to sell a spider to an arachnophobe. Design some fakes sites if you don’t have anything to show. Do some banners, tours, anything that shows the potential of your work. Make sure you present it as efficiently as possible. People do not want to root around not knowing what they are looking at.Advertise.
Make banners, buttons, links, ads, and anything that you can stick your name on. Get listed on any and all Webmaster resource sites, and design sites. This will help you establish a name base and let people know you are around.Demonstrate.
Write articles for resource sites, create different tutorials also, this will let people know you know what your doing. The more people that like your ideas, the more they will like you. Therefore the more likely you will get work.Follow these steps as I did and you will be on your way to having clients beating down your door. Also, make sure you really have something to offer before trying to sell your work. Be unique in what you design and how you present it. Clients love it when their sites are different from others, obviously.
Article written by John
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Adult Webmaster Conventions – Remember When?
Most webmasters who have been working in the adult industry for a year or two have attended an adult webmaster convention of some sort and, those of us who had the privilege of attending our first webmaster show three to four years ago will know one thing that many others don’t, there used to be a time when you could attend a webmaster show for example, the one held at Disney World (how many of you remember that?) when apart from being relaxing, you would also get a lot of business done alas, times have changed.
Fighting, Drug Taking, Getting Drunk, Rape Accusations, Theft and Criminal damage would be the headline in the national press should one of these reporters attend today’s webmaster convention, instead of a relaxing atmosphere in which you can get business done you find a slew of webmasters who, well, lets be honest here, are only attending these shows for one reason, to get drunk (for free) and to have a laugh.
Of late there seems to have been an influx of people (notice I used the word people and not ‘adult webmasters’) joining the adult industry who would appear to think that our business model is one of all night partying, sordid sex sessions and drug taking, whilst, I will be the first to admit this has gone on in the past it would certainly seem that the last 2-3 years has seen more than its fair share of the negative events happening at these conventions.
Take for example the recent Hollywood Internext Expo show, one incident that comes to mind was the fool who decided it would be a good idea to smash the mezzanine canopy above the hotel lobby, to my knowledge the culprit was never found however, I am sure there are those out there who knows who it was and well, lets be honest, they quite possibly you could be reading this article.
So what happened? How did these shows change so drastically? Quite simply I think it was the sudden onslaught of press coverage about how the adult industry makes so much money for everyone and, whilst there is a lot of money to be made in the industry, it takes a lot of work to achieve making the reported figures by the press.
To many people are entering the adult industry thinking that the ‘norm’ is that of what you can find on your average day of visiting GFY and whist, this is perhaps true for the circle of webmasters who do frequent boards such as GFY for the vast majority of hard working webmasters in the industry, the behavior of those webmasters couldn’t be further from the truth.
So where is all the business being done at the shows? It would appear that event after event the open invite list of parties are being cut down to be taken over by more intimate and sociable private parties in fact, as a company we our ourselves holding several smaller invite only parties for those people that we actually want to do business with on both a personal and a professional level.
So what does the future have in hold for the adult industry events, in all honesty I do not know however, one thing is for certain, if things continue on their current route, things are going to become a whole lot worse before they get any better.
Article written by Lee.
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Marketing Anime Sites
Anime and the various styles associated with it, such as Hentai, Manga, Comics and Toons is one of the hottest niches on the net. It is presently experiencing a huge growth, with many of the larger companies launching sites dedicated to the genre.
When someone unfamiliar with Adult Anime and Hentai hears the word Anime, they tend to think in terms of Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon or Speed Racer (if they are of my generation.) Make no mistake; what we are discussing today is NOT for children. Adult Anime and Hentai are as different from the example above as Disney Movies are from HomeGrown Video.
Targeting and marketing to the anime surfer is not that much different from any other niche, with a few notable exceptions. Taking the time to learn a little about the subject matter will make a difference in your profit margin. Even though you are still selling “sex”, or more accurately “hentai” (more on that later), with anime the “sell” is more in the fantasy aspects than reality. Anime characters can perform any way and do anything that the surfer wants, even the impossible. So you must use more creative text links and graphics to create the right feel for the surfer and lure him in, and not treat the art as if it were just mere cartoons.
True anime fans do not consider anime to be cartoons. You will get fans that like it for its sexual aspects and yet others who have a love of the art form itself. If you make light of the art or fail to create the fantasy for them, you may lose surfers. Anime is truly an art form; each picture is unique in its beauty and in its style. Each artist will render a vision of his or her own, and the variety is as wide and varied as one’s imagination. This is the appeal of anime, that and the fact that in Anime a surfer can have a character created to fulfill his fantasy, no matter how outrageous.
Bear in mind while designing, targeting and eventually linking your anime site, that this particular genre covers all age groups and appeals almost equally to woman as to men. It is also a niche that will attract surfers from many countries. It is extremely popular with your North American surfers, but a great deal of the anime surfers come from Australia, Europe and Japan, for some reason these country’s surfers love their anime! So make sure to expand the scope of the Search Engines you normally submit to, if you are not already submitting to Japanese, Australian, and other foreign SE’s. A great place to find a list of these SE’s is http://www.beaucoup.com/1geoasia.html. Don’t forget to look at alternative link lists as well, though many of the “big” list have anime and toon sections, you will definitely want to get listed on lists that are targeted to the niche, some examples would be:
http://www.toonplaces.com
http://www.hentaikitty.com
http://www.hentaiseeker.comTo help you understand a bit more about the Anime niche I have listed some descriptions of common anime terms:
Anime: In the US and many other western nations, it is limited to meaning Japanese animation (AKA Japanimation, although a lot of people don’t like that term). Characteristic features would be large eyes, funky hair colors, and often, er, accentuated physiology. In Japan, anime means animation in general, Warner Brothers, Disney as well as Macross and El Hazard.
The modern-day anime style is an adaptation of Disney style (introduced to the Japanese after WWII, by the American occupation), most notably the large eyes. However, unlike animation in America, animation or “anime” in Japan is not just for kids and the subject matter can range from deep, action packed science fiction stories to slapstick humor to even soap-opera-ish romance. In short, the only real difference between anime and other television shows and movies is that they are animated. While it’s true that in recent years there have been several American animated shows that have been aimed at a broader audience than your Saturday morning cartoon crowd, such as Titan AE, and the soon to be released Final Fantasy, the Japanese have actually been doing this for quite some time.
Japanese law formerly banned the depiction of genitals or pubic hair in art; as a result, most of the true Japanese images you’ll see distributed in Hentai Anime circles have either been censored by the Japanese government prior to distribution or auto censored by the artists themselves in compliance with the law. Underground artists have been known to produce full, all out, no holds barred uncensored works and of course not all Hentai Anime comes from Japan. Artists who were not Japanese citizens were not bound by Japanese law so uncensored Hentai Anime usually came from those countries.. The law has since been repealed. (See the book Dreamland Japan by Frederick Schott for more information on this law.)
Although the law has changed, people’s attitudes are slow to change with it and many Japanese artists continue the practice of censoring or avoiding depictions of the genitals or pubic hair. However, now that it has become legal, such depictions are sure to become more common. Sometimes, net artists will take it upon themselves to uncensor mosaic images, however, it isn’t easy to find someone who does this arduous job well, so even these are uncommon.
Hentai: The classical meaning is “metamorphosis, transformation.” It later came to mean “abnormality,” and in modern colloquial Japanese is used almost exclusively to mean “pervert” or “perversion.” When a woman insults a man in anime, she generally uses on of three terms: hentai, sukebe, and ecchi. Sukebe implies “oversexed” rather than “deviant.” Ecchi can be quite mild in some contexts, comparable to “lewd” or “Fresh!” These three terms are often used interchangeably, especially when someone is stringing together insults. In adult anime, hentai normally would lend itself to what we consider hardcore images, such as the very popular bondage anime images. In the Adult market Anime has come to signify more softcore images and Hentai hardcore.
Manga: This is what comics are called in Japan. The artist Hokusai coined the word manga in 1815, usually translated to mean “irresponsible pictures.” Traditionally drawn in black and white, sometimes with blue inks mixed in, Manga can be action comics, love stories or even hardcore fantasy.
Doujinshi: Amateur/underground Manga that often parody existing Anime or Manga. Usually done in small print runs and often Hentai in nature. They are frequently “proving grounds” for aspiring “professional” Manga artists.
Yaoi: Male homosexual relationships, or Anime or Manga stories about relationships between “beautiful boys” (bishounen). Comes from “YA-ma-nashi O-chi-nashi I-mi-nashi” (No climax, no punchline, no meaning)
Shoujo: Shoujo anime is anime originally aimed at young girls. “Shoujo” literally means “little girl”. Shoujo anime includes such series as Sailor Moon and Magic Knights Rayearth. Also referred to as Bishoujo, “Beautiful Girl”
Shounen: Shounen anime is anime originally aimed at young boys. “Shounen” literally means “Little Boy”. Shounen anime includes such series as Pokemon, Speed Racer and DragonBall Z. Also referred to as Bishonen, “Beautiful Boy”.
It is important that you educate yourself on the difference in definitions for the various styles of art. Using the wrong phrases could attract children to your site and responsible use of terms is extremely important.
As with any Website, knowing your subject matter and the surfers that view it is essential. This niche is growing more popular everyday. Many sponsors are realizing it’s potential and adding it to their sites as well as building sites specifically for this traffic. There are TGP’s and link lists dedicated solely to these sites, and legal content is available. The Anime/Cartoon surfer is an extremely loyal breed; once they discover quality sources they keep coming back. I hope this sheds some light on this highly unique niche and that the information will help webmasters market their sites to higher profits.
Article written by Bestat
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Bandwidth Explained
Bandwidth is the total amount of data that can be sent in a given time between two computer devices. The more bandwidth that is available, the faster the server.
Any webmaster expecting a decent amount of traffic to their adult site will require a web hosting package that includes a large amount of bandwidth. This is so important, especially with the growth of your online business and, ultimately your sites. The more bandwidth your server has, the larger the number of surfers who will be able to view it at the same time, and the access it quickly will be. If you don’t have enough bandwidth, surfers will not be able to access your site as quickly, and that may turn them off which in turn, will mean they will leave your site.
For this reason alone, it is important to select a hosting company that can offer you a great deal of bandwidth. As an example, larger hosting providers will have T1 lines or fiber-optic relays to access the Internet; these will provide a fair amount bandwidth. Another way is to get a dedicated server which, in turn, gives you exclusive access to your server’s connectivity instead of sharing it with others, as such allowing for maximum hardware performance.
To calculate your bandwidth needs, you must know how large each page on your site is, including the graphics and any script usage you may have. Then, you multiply that by the number of views you expect the site to get every month.
For example, say you have three 5k images on your page and a 2k HTML file – you would have 17k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let’s say in this case it is 100,000 per month), and you get 1.7 G of data to be transferred that month for that page alone. Now calculate this for each page, and you will know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.
The best way of using bandwidth efficiently is to keep the size of your html pages low. In other words, ensure your HTML programming is adequate enough to use minimal amounts of coding for the purpose you want and, that your photos and graphics are small. To reduce photo file sizes you should always use JPEG format, which can reduce files up to 5% of its original size. Make sure to use the GIF format for graphics, as opposed to TIFFs or BMPs, which are generally much larger in file size.
If you attach URLs to your IMG SRC that link to another person’s images without their permission, this is known throughout the online industry as hotlinking which, costs the person you are linking the image of money and not yourself. For this reason, hotlinking, is looked upon dimly.
The unfortunate truth is that hotlinking is rife in the online industry. However, lets not let that deter you, by utilizing a file called .htaccess on your server, you can prevent other dishonest webmasters hotlinking your images.
As with most things in this industry, you need to shop around to find the best prices available to you. However, that said, as a general rule of thumb, a gig of transfer can cost between $1 and $5 these are usually thought to be good prices for a gig of bandwidth. You can also get certain hosting packages that have a specific amount of bandwidth included in the price, however, the one draw back of these types of deals is that, if you go over that limit, you will either need to pay and excess bandwidth usage fee or, upgrade your hosting plan.
Article Written By Lee
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Protecting The Kids – Europe’s Role
As adult webmasters we have certain obligations we must fulfill daily whether these be, legal or moral.
One issue that is constantly cropping up in our industry is that of minors (Children) accessing adult websites and, more importantly, the ease of which they can do.
Recent figures released by one of Europe’s top internet analysis companies show that children in Europe and, specifically within the United Kingdom are more likely to visit a website and that, ‘showing that around one in five Internet kids (290,000) check out the sex sites’.
These figures are certainly alarming to say the least, bearing in mind they are specifically talking about the United Kingdom, that leaves a vast majority of Europe, as yet, un-analyzed.
We should all adapt to new methods in order to protect minors from accessing our site whether that includes placing your sites behind AVS systems which, in my opinion is one of the best ways and, most profitable of protecting minors or, utilizing ‘web safe’ software packages that are available to block access to adult sites completely we all need to adopt these practices.
The fact of the matter remains that, in this day and age, no matter what precautions we take in order to prevent access there will, undoubtedly, be a majority of children who can and will, get access to adult sites.
Does that mean we should compromise on the quality of our sites? No
Does that mean we need to think harder about how we develop our sites? YesIt takes very little effort to subscribe to the services to block access and, you can get a single line of code to place within your html from ICRA which will at least, deter underage surfers from accessing your sites.
In addition to the above mentioned service, you can also place a link on your warning page/s to the following services for parents to block access from children to our sites, SAFESURF, CYBERPATROL, NETNANNY and, SURFWATCH amongst others. Its not just about utilizing software and ratings on our sites though, we can go much further than that and, for instance, using nothing but softcore content on our sites will protect to some extent the materials available to children but, in addition you will also notice your conversion ratios will go up! I have and, I’m sure you have, heard it time and time again.. Make them ‘Pay for pink’ and, by using softcore images on your sites that’s exactly what you are doing.
I for one certainly hope that you take heed at this article, protecting our children is paramount if, we are to succeed in the business, it is getting harder and harder to control who accesses our site but, we can at least take a step in the right direction.
Article written by Lee
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Cascading Style Sheet Basics
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been around for a while now, and act as a complement to plain old HTML files.
Style sheets allow a developer to separate HTML code from formatting rules and styles. It seems like many HTML beginners’ under-estimate the power and flexibility of the style sheet. In this article, I’m going to describe what cascading style sheets are, their benefits, and two ways to implement them.
Cascading What’s?
They’re what chalk is to cheese, what ice-cream is to Jell-O they complement HTML and allow us to define the style (look and feel) for our entire site in just one file!They get their name from the fact that each different style declaration can be “cascaded” under the one above it, forming a parent-child relationship between the styles.
They were quickly standardized, and both Internet Explorer and Netscape built their latest browser releases to match the CSS standard (or, to match it as closely as they could).
So, you’re still wondering what a style sheet is? A style sheet is a free-flowing document that can either be referenced by, or included into a HTML document (Kind of like using SSI to call a file but not, if that makes sense). Style sheets use blocks of formatted code to define styles for existing HTML elements, or new styles, called ‘classes’.
Style sheets can be used to change the height of some text, to change the background color of a page, to set the default border color of a table the list goes on and on. Put simply though, style sheets are used to set the formatting, color scheme and style of an HTML page.
Style sheets should really be used instead of the standard , < b >, < i > and < u > tags because:
One style sheet can be referenced from many pages, meaning that each file is kept to a minimum size and only requires only extra line to load the external style sheet file
If you ever need to change any part of your sites look/feel, it can be done quickly and only needs to be done in one place: the style sheet and furthermore, it is done globally.
With cascading style sheets, there are many page attributes that simply cannot be set without them: individual tags can have different background colors, borders, indents, shadows, etc.
Style sheets can either be inline (included as part of a HTML document), or, referenced externally (Contained in a separate file and referenced from the HTML document). Inline style sheets are contained wholly within a HTML document and will only change the look and layout of that HTML file.
Open your favorite text editor and enter the following code. Save the file as styles.html and open it in your browser:
Cascading Style Sheet Example.
h1
{
color: #636594;
font-family: Verdana;
size: 18pt;
}This is one big H1 tag!
When you fire up your browser, you should see the text “This is one big H1 tag!” in a large, blue Verdana font face.
Let’s step through the style code step by step. Firstly, we have a pretty standard HTML header. The page starts with the tag followed by the tag. Next, we use a standard tag to set the title of the page we are working with.
Notice, though, that before the tag is closed, we have our tag, its contents, and then the closing tag.
h1
{
color: #636594;
font-family: Verdana;
size: 18pt;
}When you add the style sheet code inline (as part of the HTML document), it must be bound by and tags respectively. Our example is working with the tag. We are changing three attributes of the ’s style: the text color (color), the font that any tags on the page will be displayed in (font-family), and lastly, the size of the font (size).
The code between the { and } are known as the attributes. Our sample code has three. Try changing the hexadecimal value of the color attribute to #A00808 and then save and refresh the page. You should see the same text, just colored red instead of blue.
An Example Of An External Style Sheet.
External style sheets are similar to internal style sheets, however, they are stripped of the and tags, and need to be referenced from another HTML file to be used.Create a new file called “whatever.css” and enter the following code into it:
h1
{
color: #a00808;
font-family: Verdana;
size: 18pt
}Next, create a HTML file and name it test.html. Enter the following code into test.html:
External Style Sheet Reference Example.
This is one big H1 tag!As mentioned above, you can see that the actual code in whatever.css is exactly the same as it was in the inline example. In our HTML file, we simply place a tag in the section of our page. The rel=”stylesheet” attribute tells the browser that the link to the external file is a style sheet. The type=”text/css” attribute tells the browser that whatever.css is a text file containing CSS (cascading style sheet) declarations. Lastly, the href=”whatever.css” attribute tells the browser that the actual file we want to load is whatever.css.
Conclusion.
Well, there you have it, a quick look at style sheets and how to implement both an inline and external version. Checkout the links below if you’ve never worked with cascading style sheets before. You will be surprised at some of the things you can do with them!Article written by Lee.
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Marketing Sites With Slogans
With the constant changes happening in the adult industry webmaster need to look towards alternative ways of marketing not only their own sites but the sites of their sponsors. This is where something that we have all seen daily can come in handy, what is this marketing tool? Simple, Slogans.
Slogans – What Are They?
A slogan is a short, memorable advertising phrase for example, ‘Just Do it’ – Nike. By utilizing a slogan on your site you are not only giving your surfers something other by which they can remember your site by but, you are actively building up your brand which, in turn, can mean more repeat traffic and ultimately, more sales.How To Make A Slogan.
So now you know what a slogan is how do you go about creating one? Simple, you should think of something short, usually three to four word slogans work the best again, as with the Nike example above ‘Just Do it’ its short, sweet and memorable, try to make your own slogan fit within this guideline and you are half way done. Another thing that you may like to consider is making your slogan practical or humorous, something witty can often stay in a persons mind a lot longer than something serious, play on peoples memory and ensure they remember your brand.Where To Use Your Slogan.
Now that you have thought up a slogan which you feel will work on your traffic and sites you need to consider the places where you can use it for maximum impact, the most obvious place to use your slogan is on your site design, either at the top or the bottom of your pages, make it clear and more importantly, make it stand out. In addition, if you have any banners or buttons created, ensure you utilize the slogan on those creatives, the goal is to have your slogan seen by as many people, as quickly as possible.Article written by Lee
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