welcome headers

I'm wondering if someone can point me to a tutorial for modifying welcome headers for guests into an image that'll look decent to guests, while being better for SEO than the text?

Obviously the real bulk of the work is mapping the image so that links work, so any information on that would be appreciated

Well, I just went ahead and used dreamweaver to map it, guess it wasn't as difficult as I had imagined it would be..

I don't know how it looks though, so if someone wants to view my forums and let me know, I'd appreciate it.

It doesnt look too great in the other themes, but anyone visiting the page for the first time will likely be on the default theme, and if it helps boost our search ratings.. then it's a risk I'm willing to take

URL: The Liberty Lounge Political Forums

It looks fine. Why not change the image name to something with a keyword, and add relevant alt text?

Code:

political-forums-welcome.gif
"Liberty Lounge Political Forums - Welcome"

FYI - We are using an image on our guest welcome header as well. It does come with an additional drawback, specifically that you cannot update the content as easily because of the required link mapping. Of course, this is only really a problem if you planned on updating the information quite frequently.

Yeah, I don't think we'll be updating it that often unless something major happens

I changed the image to your suggested name and alt text.. I didn't realize file names for images had any relevance.. appreciate that

By the way, doing some searching, I noticed the welcome headers text in a LOT of the results.. I'm really hoping this change will give better results with the search engines

Looking good! I wish more and more people would do this

it looks default to me ??

btw, I've been thinking of some stuff I want to do with my welcome header,, check out this one a client wanted..
integrated the quick register and welcome header
Travel Forums by Destination 360
actually intergraded some welcome text into the quick register

That's cool! We were thinking about that, but had some problems with quick register's XHTML compliance :(

And, I'm glad it looks default.. that's the goal

It's an image instead of text now, which will keep the spiders from viewing the image and indexing the text on every single page

Originally Posted by Loco

it looks default to me ??

btw, I've been thinking of some stuff I want to do with my welcome header,, check out this one a client wanted..
integrated the quick register and welcome header
Travel Forums by Destination 360
actually intergraded some welcome text into the quick register

Forums with that skin are not allowed here.

j/k

The idea is that you don't want the "non-contributory" text of the welcome headers affecting the density of relevant content within your thread and forum pages (for guests/spiders). Although liberty's Welcome Headers look the same, they are actually a gif image

====

====

Only if you really care about different styles showing up nicely to unregistered users, I tried this out and it worked ok. I used a gif image with a transparent background, so it would match the background of all styles nicer.

But then, I looked at Darker styles, and it all looked like crap, or was not readable. (dark text on dark background)

I'm not officially online yet to show you, but if you take a look at that Liberty Lounge site, as unregistered and choose the Liberty Dark skin, you'll see that the image isn't readable.

So for Darker skins, like that one, I went into Style Manager, Edit Templates, and on the welcome_headers template for that particular skin, about 15 lines down, I changed:

<td class="alt1">

to:

<td bgcolor = "#eeeeee">

That got rid of inheriting the dark styles color and changed the whole welcome box to the color "#eeeeee" (or whatever lighter color you want to use) and then the dark text showed up clean on the light background.

Do we really have to change the welcome headers text to an image? Is there any good reason for that?

CAn someone help with an A-B-C of how to change the Welcome headers text into images.

I really like the one on this forum.

Please?

Originally Posted by Darkblade

Do we really have to change the welcome headers text to an image? Is there any good reason for that?

it prevents spiders from indexing the text in the welcome headers, because spiders cant index text in images , so it increases keyword density on the showthread, forumdisplay pages ...

Originally Posted by Big-K

CAn someone help with an A-B-C of how to change the Welcome headers text into images.

I really like the one on this forum.

Please?

you can find a how to here: [HOW-TO] Make your Welcome Headers an image!


Iain

Wouldn't it also help with keyword densiy if you included a bit of advertising for your site in the guest welcoem header that included a lot of your keywords?

I don't know ig google would penalise me for having "duplicate content" in the header all the time, but it would definately get lots of hits for specific keywords.

/John