eCommerce Website Hosting, Design, Maintenance, and Marketing

Can You See Me Now?
by Taureth
July 15, 2005

Can ALL of the graphics on your website be seen by everyone?

You put a lot of time and effort into creating graphics so you have an attractive and functional website. Here are a few tips to make sure that they can be seen by everyone who visits your site.

1) Bad Links?
Check and recheck your image links. Go to each page from different pages within your website. If necessary, you can hardcode the links with a full URL (http://www.yoursite.com/images/yourimage.gif). Another way to be sure that all of the images are available is to put them into Include pages which have the image links hardcoded. This also serves to make it easier to change any graphics that you use on several pages, and it adds uniformity to your site.

2) Squished Graphics or Text?
Make sure that when you design your page layout, that all of your graphics fit well in each of the common screen resolutions (800 x 600 & 1024 x 768 are the most common), both with and without a search or folder bar open on the left. Also, make sure that your table attributes are set properly so that graphics that repeat only do so in the proper direction.

3) Blocked by Ad Banner Blocking Software?
With more and more ad banners on the web, the popularity of ad banner blocking software is increasing. If the size of a graphic on your site matches a common banner size, it may be incorrectly seen as a banner and will be blocked. To reduce this possibility, the graphics on your site should not be one of the following sizes:

300 x 250 250 x 250 240 x 400 336 x 280 180 x 150 468 x 60 234 x 60 88 x 31 120 x 90 120 x 60 120 x 240 125 x 125 728 x 90 160 x 600 120 x 600 300 x 600

You should also avoid certain words in the links to your graphics: link, ads, ad, click, banner, ban, clk, ban-clk, promote, sponsor, advertisement, adv, page, top, as well as any words that may be associated with adult material.

About the Author: Taureth is the co-founder and head SEO of Devil's Advoc8 Inc. an eCommerce website design, hosting, maintenance, and marketing firm. You can find out more by visiting their homepage at www.DevilsAdvoc8.com This article may be distributed or reposted freely as long as this section remains attached and unaltered.