Decorating

DECORATING

Now that you've moved in, you can start decorating. Depending on the focus of your site, you may want to add some photos, drawings, logos, sounds, special effects and other cool stuff.

photos - a digital camera or scanner can translate your photos into a digital format that can be used on your site (another alternative is to have your photos scanned and put on disc or request that your regular film be processed to disc or put on the internet

drawings/clipart - scan them in like photos or draw in a computer program like Paint or Corel Draw or use images from compilation CDs

sounds - add sounds to most pages in a .wav or midi format

animated gifs - are pictures or drawings with a .gif extension that move like this croaking frog

(not all .gifs are animated)

javascript and applets - are HTML snippets that give instructions to do certain things like scroll text in the status bar and run the missing kids banner below

other enhancements - counters, trackers, referrers, affiliate programs and a lot more are offered by the various hosts (much of it is also free, too)

If you are interested in finding more graphics and enhancements, there are lots of freebie sites that offer free cut and paste javascript/applets, photos, clipart, backgrounds, coordinated graphic sets, fonts, etc. Please follow the guidelines outlined by each individual site and DO NOT USE COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL WITHOUT PERMISSION!

WARNING: Graphic intensive pages take more time to display in visitors' browsers. There is a risk that net surfers will click away from your site without waiting for the full page to load if there are large pictures, many pictures and/or too many enhancements.