Thinking Laterally With Gothic Lesbians

Steve

Sex Story

Being the original blockhead I can tell you that it's pretty easy to fall into the trap of concrete thinking. There is only one way to do something, a free site should look a certain way, only one sort of banner will do, text links are should be a certain size or color etc. etc.

Sometimes looking at something in just one way can be valuable, especially when you're new to the industry. If you don't take time to learn the basics but want to rush off and soar with the eagles before you can walk with the turkeys then you are bound to fail. So being very focused in your thinking can be a good thing for beginners.

A bit further down the track though being unable to see different ways of doing things can begin to be a problem. Problems and challenges can arise but simple solutions are ignored simply because we can't think outside of the box - we're focused and rigid in our thinking.

For example, I was building a free site yesterday and came to the gallery pages where a long thin banner would have been ideal. Unfortunately the sponsor I was using didn't have any long thin banners so I wasted a bit of time re-designing the gallery pages.

I wish I had seen the site under review before I started on my free site because it addresses the problem of what to do when the sponsor doesn't have the sort of banner you want and overcomes the problem with a simple solution.

It shows that thinking outside the box - or thinking laterally - can overcome all sorts of problems and in so doing present the surfer with some different advertising that will catch his eye and arouse his curiosity.

The site under review can be found here:

Remember I wanted a long thin banner for my gallery pages? Obviously so did Voltar but instead of doing without a thin banner he thought laterally and built his own around one smaller 120x240 banner.

It's a technique anyone can use and requires no special skill. While Voltar used the same 120x240 banner twice there is nothing to stop you combining two separate banners to achieve the same result.

In fact if you go back to the main page of the site you will see that Voltar did exactly that with the banner in the middle of the page. Two odd sized buttons combined with text and there is a very effective marketing tool.

There are some other things to notice about the site too. Notice how simple the page layout is on both the index and main pages. You won't see any great gobs of heavy graphics trying to bludgeon the surfer into signing up, just the use of some great text and colors to draw the surfer right into the mood of the site.

Even the links to the Goth sponsor are in a color that has a subtle impact on the surfer and notice how the advertising on the gallery pages has been designed to stand out from the thumbnails.

It's hard to choose a background color that fits into the Goth them and at the same time allows you to blend the thumbs into the background. Voltar hasn't even tried but he certainly has succeeded in getting advertising to jump off the pages.

The gallery pages are also a little different in that both of them have 15 pics. Now there are some link lists that are now demanding a minimum of 30 pics on a free site but I doubt that Voltar has produced 15 pic gallery pages simply to appease link list owners.

Think outside the box again when it comes to those gallery pages. Don't look at them as part of a free site, look at each of them as a complete entity and what have you got?

You've got a page that is only going to require a minimum of work to turn into a TGP gallery. Yet again, you have another example on this site of thinking outside the box.

There is always more than one way of doing something, more than one way of achieving your goals when it comes to site building and the site we've just looked at gives you plenty of examples of how to think outside the box.

To submit a site for review:

Send an email to Steve and put 'site review' in the subject