Showing Off Elegant Photographs
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 Seattle home stager Patty Bonnell's portfolio of elegantly staged homes quickly outgrew the static pages we originally published to show off her work.
She wanted potential clients to be able to see more examples of her many styles of rooms without having to click to separate pages.
The solution: creating galleries that swap out the large photo whenever the visitor moves their mouse over one of the thumbnails.
Do you have more photos to share than currently fit on your site?
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| A New Look Each Time: Featuring Randomized Photographs |
 Do you want each visit to your website to look different to your visitor?
My church's webmaster, Guy Burns, introduced me to this simple method of making your site catch the eye of everyone -- including regular visitors who return time and time again.
The large photograph on the page is chosen randomly from a pool of available images. Each time the page is loaded, a different photo is chosen.
Your visitors will see a new picture and think you're constantly updating your site... unless they are like me and refresh the browser over and over until they've seen all of the photographs in the pool. (There are 44 of them in the church's list, just in case you want to go through them all!)
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Help with Typos: Spell Check for Your Web Browser
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 I am spending more and more time filling out online forms.
Sometimes they're straight-forward customer service forms, and other times they are disguised as blog posts or online feedback and comments.
My spelling and typing ability is not up to all these form-filling tasks!
Fortunately version 2 of the free Firefox web browser has a built in spell checker. It automatically underlines in red suspect words as you type.
I've touted Firefox in the past, but if you haven't yet switched to it for its security, speed, and other usability benefits, how about testing out its spelling abilities?
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Talk to Your Visitors
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Author Hans Camenzind knows great stories about the people and events involved in creating our modern electronic world. We've recommended his book, The History of Electronics, in past newsletters.
His family-redesigned site has a cool new feature which uses Flash technology in a good way! Many of you know that I think Flash is generally poorly used, and I hate its use in introductory home pages or in pointlessly moving graphics on web pages.
Hans' site uses the technology to stream short conversations on some of the more colorful figures in the development of technology.
Check out the stories, (buy the book if you haven't already!), and see a good use of the Flash technology.
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| Quick Notes |
 Ozdachs will be traveling not able to respond immediately to emails or calls from Monday, August 13 through Thursday, August 23. We will be working from our notebook computer during this time, but if you know your site needs changes -- especially significant ones -- please send them today before we're on the road!
- What do you need to know about employee theft?
Long-time Bay Area consumer reporter Chris Bjorklund asked Ozdachs client Charles Sterck to talk with her about investigating employee theft, and she recorded the conversation for a podcast posted on AllBusiness.com. Congratulations to Sterck Kulik O'Neill accounting group on the exposure! And, thanks for the tips, Charles!
- During the past month we've been using Microsoft's Expression Web to update the sites we originally created using FrontPage. Whoa!!
We discovered several more critical problems with Expression Web that affect previous FrontPage users.
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