How to Create Image Hot Spots

My WYSIWYG editor does not have an easy way to handle image maps; that is, creating hyperlinks in different areas of an image on a web page. For example, you display a map of the United States and you want visitors to your site to click on their state to find a store in that state.

In order to make such a “hot spot” you have to know the coordinates of that spot, but how do you determine those? Some HTML editors, such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage make this easy by allowing you to draw the hot spots right on the image and take care of the code, but if you don’t have that option, what do you do?

Fortunately, there is a trick where your browser will tell you the coordinates. I found out about this at http://www.elated.com/articles/creating-image-maps/.  That site explains the procedure quite well, so I won’t go into the details here. But, to summarize, this is how it works.

1.    Prepare the page with the image in it.

2.    Place “dummy” HTML tags around the image.

3.    Upload the page to your website.

4.    Load the uploaded page into your browser.

5.    Move your mouse to the top left-hand corner of the rectangle where you want the hot spot.

6.    The x and y coordinates of that point show up in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window.

7.    Write down the coordinate values.

8.    Repeat steps 5 to 7 for the bottom right-hand corner of the rectangle.

9.    Incorporate these 4 coordinates into your HTML code, as explained in the article.

Instead of rectangular hot spot areas you can also have circles and polygons using the same method. The article also explains how to do that.

I tested it and it works like a charm.

To your success!

Firefox Prevents Redirection

When you use the Firefox browser, you may occasionally get the message, “Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page.”

You can override this by clicking the Allow button, but it gets annoying after a while.

Here is a quick tip on how you can turn that feature off and be redirected without harassment from Firefox.

On the Tools menu, click Options…, select the Advanced tab and uncheck Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page, then click OK.

To your success!

Peter

To Measure is to Know

If you want to grow your business you have to measure
your progress. Otherwise you’re just guessing.

Blogging is one way to increase traffic to your website, but do you know how much traffic you are getting?

If you don’t, http://statcounter.com/ is an excellent, FREE hit counter and stat-measurement website. They provide a simple code snippet that you can paste into
your web pages, which enables you to get the data you need to know.

This information is private to you and visitors to your website will not see a distracting hit counter or annoying third party ads. You log into their website to find the info you want.

Easy to implement and no downside that I am aware of.

Highly recommended.

In my next posting I’ll have more to say about measuring stats.

Until then, here’s to your success!

Peter

Blogging for Newbies

This is the start of a new blog.

Hi, my name is Peter Verhoeff. My purpose for this blog is to assist business owners and entrepreneurs in improving their bottom line with the help of computers and the Internet.

But, if you are not a business owner nor an entrepreneur, don’t feel excluded. This blog is really for anyone who can benefit from it.

The information provided here will be mainly related to computers and the Internet, but may also cover other, dis-related topics. That’s the beauty of blogging: You are not limited and you can write about whatever strikes you as important.

Anyway, this first blog, appropriately, deals with getting started with blogging.

Being rather a novice myself, I was looking for a painless way to get started. Although there is plenty of material on blogging, much of it is either too technical, or assumes you are already a blogger and looking to improve your postings.

Today, I decided to bite the bullet and get down to brass tacks, so to speak, and start blogging for real.

I actually started out searching for ways to increase traffic to my websites and the majority of search results had the word “blog” in them, so it became evident that blogging is a major factor in improving Web traffic.

So, next I searched for “blogging 101” and “getting started with blogging.” Learning a new subject is largely a matter of finding things you can relate to and expanding from there, one step at a time.

I found a helpful article at http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging that presented the material on an easy gradient for me. The article referred me to a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI, which I found very helpful to provide some stable data (basic information) on the topic.

Next was http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress. However, I balked when I read about software to be uploaded to my server. This would  not do for someone looking for a painless way to start blogging.

Then I remembered that I had taken a stab at blogging over 3 years ago. That had been real simple. I consulted my little notebook and there it was: http://peterverhoeff.wordpress.com/. Postings on Government and New Years Resolutions.

I didn’t have to upload anything then. How come I did now? Then the penny dropped. That was wordpress.com, not wordpress.org. A quick search revealed the following very helpful article that spelled out the differences: http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/.

And, voila! Here I am, blogging away. My advice: If you want to start blogging and are not concerned with tweaking the HTML, go to http:wordpress.com and click the big “Sign up now” button. It’s easy to get started, and free.

To your success,

Peter

http://www.sbpgo.com