Bullets

by

Voltar

CloudCash

A series of webmastering hints by the spring Webmaster of the Year 2003, Voltar.

Welcome to the very first in an ongoing series of weekly helpful webmastering hints. First let me explain about the title of this series. The little dot next to a phrase or item of note is called a bullet. It's the LI tag in HTML code. This series is based on quick and easy to understand webmaster hints and tips, in other words, items that would under the normal course of things be bulleted items so they would not be missed. Thus the name of this series of article, "Bullets". Well I've rattled on enough its time to get on to todays bullet.

Todays bullet is about gallery design.

When designing a gallery for TGPing you sould always keep in mind other common and long term uses for that gallery. Ultimately it'll serve at least 4 or 5 different purposes before you are done with that content. These are things you should keep in mind when you do your designing so you can adapt it to the other uses in mear minutes and without undo problems.

The 4 to 5 common uses you willl get out of a common gallery are:

-The TGP gallery (on average 15 pics).

-3 TGP2 galleries(on average 5 pics each)

-Website (free or AVS) galleries (10 to 15 pics each as needed)

-Search Engine listings and fodder (galleries give you great chances to add in very relevent alt text on a high number of images as well as img names, to bring higher search engine rankings)

If you design you gallery so you have 5 thumbnails in a set area with advertising, it makes the gallery it's self almost modular, thus its easily transformed into and for the other uses you need it to be.

Make sure to never table each thumbnail in its own table cell, this causes you to lose this modular usage. With a simple vspace=3 hspace=3 command in the img src tag, you can have your thumbnailed pics nicely spaced and grouped all within a single table cell or just centered with the use of BR tags on the page. This allows for more time to be spent on the ad it's self. The real reason for the gallery to exist.

I hope todays bullet helps many of you in your building and designing for the web. Lock, Load, and be ready to profit!

Voltar