Adult-adult guide

'Link building', for those who don't know, is the practice of gaining links from other sites. Links are important. They deliver authority in the eyes of search engines, traffic if you're lucky, and a chance that someone else will link to you, too.

The days of rude gossips about link exchange being dead are over. Now Internet audience understands that success and failure with link exchange directory comes up to such simple things as relevancy of your link partners and how appealing are the looks of your directory. There is a simple way to bring any directory on new level with clean and fair visualization strategy.

Do you use thumbshots of your link partners in ? If not - you are missing extra power. Put yourself in the shoes of your site visitor. Ok, site visitor got to your link directory, sees different categories, different links. Maybe you've done a great job about categorizing each link, and even provided a searching mechanism for necessary links - good job. But nothing stops you from making one step further on the road to give maximum pleasant experience of searching your directory. Put thumbshots of index pages of your sites-partners next to link title and description. And you will see how great are the looks of your directory with this one tiny change.

For those who do not know what is a thumbshot, here goes the definition - thumbshot in simple words is a screenshot of web page.

With thumbshots being close to each link your visitors instantly visualize link partners before they click. And this is where your gold pot is hidden, because simple thumbshot give your directory a pack of advantages.

1. Your link exchange directory looks more professional.

When you compare the looks of the sites that go together with candy looking thumbshots with the same page that looks like a pile of links without thumbshots - absolutely another impression.

2. Your link exchange directory becomes more user-friendly.

No doubts here I think. People instantly preview what they will see. Site visitors understand that you have made everything possible to make their clicking experience on your site super fruitful. They will be getting back to your directory more and more, just because you give them an advantage that others are missing.

3. Your potential link partners are magnetized too.

When someone is on the verge to submit or not submit a link to your directory, thumbshot can become a trigger point inside their mind to say yes and submit you their link. If they have any brain, they will surely understand that their link with their thumbshot in your directory has bigger chances to be clicked on. Exactly what they are looking for.

4. Extra SEO power from thumbshots.

Surely each thumbshot can be given certain title in alt. And most probably this title will have your keywords, because you are building links with relevant sites. It means when search engines index your directory, they see now only usual link with title and description; they also see a bulk of pictures that carry necessary keywords inside. Of course, the alt title is not critical with search engines to love or hate your directory. But missing extra advantage is just a not very wise thing to do, isn't it?

Are there any disadvantages with thumbshots? No. But it is about some extra job with your link directory. If you are using a solution that automates link building and creates link directory pages for you, they may not have an option to add a picture to link title and description. But this is not a problem. Send them email with suggestion. For programmers it's not difficult: professional link directory software developers will help you with it. And if they reject, then better look for those who are ready to support their clients - not simply sell and forget.

With this list of advantages that thumbshots can bring your link exchange directory, would you agree to miss an opportunity of adding extra power to your directory? Surely not.

So, use this knowledge and make changes before others do them. Any type of link exchange directory will benefit from these efforts. And you site visitors will be bookmarking your pages. In addition to other benefits of your directory this can turn into new level of success with link building.

This article describes how Dreamweaver implements templates. Technically, to use Dreamweaver templates, you don't need to know any of the information given in this article; but it is handy to know something about what's going on under the hood in case you need to troubleshoot a Dreamweaver template based document.

Templates are a tool that is used in many computer applications including Microsoft Word, AutoCAD, and other office automation and design products. Templates are useful when you have a group of documents that share many similar design features. You implement the common features one time in the template, and then just customize the template with the individual features of each document.

Templates are Used Only at Design Time

It is important to understand that are totally a design time construct. Only two things separate a Dreamweaver template from any other HTML document:

1. Dreamweaver template documents have a ".dwt" extension.

2. Dreamweaver templates contain specially defined HTML comments that define the editable and non editable area of the template.

When you create an "instance" document that is based on a Dreamweaver template and store it on a web server, the web server is completely unaware that the document was based on a template. It treats the document the same as any other HTML document, and ignores the template comments in the document the same as it would ignore any other comments in an HTML document.

Similarly, a web browser would be completely unaware that a document was based on a Dreamweaver template, and would also ignore the template comments the same as it would ignore any other comments in an HTML document.

Tag Syntax

Dreamweaver has two sets of tags:

* Template Tags are used in template files (files that have suffix .dwt).

* Instance Tags are used in the "instance" documents you create that are based on a template file (files that typically have a suffix .htm or .html).

Dreamweaver defines about thirty different template tags, but all of them have the following syntax:

where TEMPLATE_TAG_NAME and the parameters are replaced with an actual template tag name and actual parameter names. For example:

In the above example, the template tag is a TemplateBeginEditable tag named "Region 1".

The syntax of instance tags is quite similar:

Tag Pairs

Many template tags are paired, having an opening and a closing tag. For example, the "TemplateBeginEditable" tag described above always starts an editable region that is ended with a "TemplateEndEditable". The two tags come as a pair, defined as follows:

-- HTML Code goes here --- How Dreamweaver uses Template Tags

One of the simplest and most important things that Dreamweaver does with Template/Instance tags is to define what regions of an instance document (document created based on a template document) can be edited. BUT BEWARE . . . If you use Dreamweaver to open a template based document in CODE VIEW, you can edit any part of the document in any way you please -- but this is generally not a good thing to do. In Dreamweaver document design view, Dreamweaver respects the instance tags that are included in a document; for example, it will only allow you to edit areas of the document that begin with an "InstanceBeginEditable" (or similar type) tag.

When you have finished editing your web page, the Dreamweaver Instance Tags will remain in it, but as previously stated, these tags are ignored by your Web Server and your Browser.

Finally, if you update a template in Dreamweaver, all of the documents based on the template will be updated too.

Conclusion

Dreamweaver templates work by using specially defined HTML comment tags to mark regions of Dreamweaver template documents and instance documents. You should recognize Dreamweaver template and instance tags, and understand what they do, but you should only edit them in Dreamweaver Design View, not in Code View. For more information on actually using Dreamweaver templates, see my upcoming article "Dreamweaver Tip: Build Better Websites Faster with Templates".