You’ve only got seconds to grab a visitors attention and get them to stick around and browse your website. What can you do to help keep them there? Here are two easy ways to add an element of professional fun to your website.

1) Slideshow of Your Products or Portfolio

There are several options for creating a slideshow of images. Here are four (the easiest is last and takes very little technical know-how, if you’ve got pictures and can follow directions, you’re all set).

** Animated gif — combine several images into an animated gif using software like Adobe Image Ready, Jasc Animation Shop or Banner Maker Pro.

** Flash — make a flash video with the images using Adobe Flash or similar program. Some swfs allow you to control them with an XML file, which is easier.

** Java Applet — there are some java applets you can use to do a slideshow. That’s more technical though as far as the coding and requires that you have a hosting account or somewhere to host the java applet file. If you outsource your website design your designer/programmer can probably handle this for you.

** Easy Option! Put all your images in www.photobucket.com or www.slide.com and make one there.

You can see a slide.com slideshow in action at www.zoombabygear.com or a photobucket.com slideshow in action at my design portfolio page.

2) Add a Real “Hello” to Greet Your Visitors

You’ve probably seen the websites where the owner greets you with a recorded message — “Hi, and thanks for stopping by my website…”

You can add this to your website, too! I’ll share the free way, and then the easy way.

If your computer comes with a built in microphone, or you can plug one in, you can download the free program Audacity to record an audio file with and convert it to MP3. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Or you may already have a program on your computer for sound. I use GarageBand on my MacBook.

Next, upload it to your website and you can either link to it or use a flash file like this one to play it: http://www.macloo.com/examples/audio_player/

See it in action on the top of my webpage at www.themusesguide.com

If you want to avoid recording programs and flash code, the easier way to do this is with Audio Acrobat. You can sign up for an account, then just call a special phone number and record your message by phone. They’ll provide you with copy and paste code to add it to your website. www.audioacrobat.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Website Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.