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Automatic Thumbnails, Transition Effects, and the Usual Search Engine Stuff

Dear Dr. Website®: I have an e-commerce site with dynamically generated pages using JavaScript. I am about to submit my URL to the search engines. But, I have been told that search engines, for the most part, will ignore JavaScript and that I should create some static pages with the pertinent information about my products.

So my plan is to create a crawler page which will contain links to all my static pages. I will then submit this page to the search engines for indexing my site. I will also use this page as my index.html.

Everything is fine except that I need to have my site visitors to automatically be transferred to my homepage.html. This is so that they do not get a chance to click on the links to the static pages. I would rather have them go through the normal route.

How can I have the index.html automatically reroute the visitor to another page? Once I do this, would the search engines also be rerouted to the other page?

You can always use:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--//
window.location = "scroll.html";
//-->
</SCRIPT>

Replace scroll.html with the page you wish the visitor to go to. Place this code in the HEAD of your document, below the META tags (you should have KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION meta tags for the search engines). Search engines will ignore the JavaScript; browsers will not.

Dear Dr. Website®: I want to put a picture gallery on my site where a viewer can choose from a selection of thumbnails, click on a thumbnail, and be transported to a page with the photo in its original dimensions. How do I do that?

You can do even better than that! This simple code will also have the effect of preloading the images so the large picture will load instantly in a new default-size browser window when they click on it. Don't put too many images on one page when using this technique. The width and height can be chosen for any thumbnail size you want.

<a href="image.gif" target="_blank">
<img src="image.gif" width=40 height=40></a>

To size the new window to specific dimensions, use JavaScript (see this past Dr. Website column), though if you do that, I suggest you size the window to fit your biggest image rather than trying to "customize" it for each one.

Dear Dr. Website®: I've seen Web pages that scroll or dissolve before making the transition to the next page. How is that done?

These are called transition effects and are limited to MSIE 4+ browsers. You achieve that effect by adding specific META tags to the HEAD of your pages. This page shows you how to do it using MS FrontPage, while this reference page shows you the proper codes. Here is an example of transition META tags:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Page-Enter" 
CONTENT = "RevealTrans (Duration=4, 
Transition=23)">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Page-Exit" 
CONTENT = "RevealTrans (Duration=4, 
Transition=23)">

Dear Dr. Website®: Every page I build and submit to the search engines gets me listed at the top in my domain name, emailprofits.net, even though I use keywords like email and profits. What's causing this to happen?

That's happening because there is only one emailprofits.net, but the other keywords you are using can be found on many Web sites. Use the top keywords for your site in your META keyword tag, in your META description tag, and on your page. Put the META tags first, before any JavaScript, and directly after the title of your site, which should also include a few of the keywords.

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