Rollover Buttons
and Linking
Most rollover buttons are image
swaps that are triggered by your mouse action. This rollover
is an image of the words 'Click Me'. When you rollover
it, it changes to a second image with some shadow effects
applied to it. When you click down you see a third image
with even more effects applied to it.
Alot of labor can be involved when
designing with rollover buttons. Every button has several
images which each have to be created, saved as a file
in the website and then uploaded to your website's server.
If you have 10 three stage rollovers like the 'Click Me'
button above then you'll have 30 images to make, optimize
and uploaded.
In order for the buttons on a webpage
to work smoothly, all the button images have to be pre-loaded
(down loaded) to your visitor's computer when they land
on your webpage with the rollover buttons. For this reason,
your button images should not be any bigger than 2k or
3k each.
Your buttons won't work until they've
been downloaded. If you have 10 three stage rollover buttons
and each image is 3k in file size, then your webpage already
has 90k worth of buttons on a page you're trying to keep
below 130k - 160k in total file size. The 3 files for
'Click Me' button above are 2k, 5k and 5k each. That's
12k for one button.
This button isn't programed to do
anything on click but you can do whatever you can think
up. Buttons will usually send you somewhere or open a
popup or a page from your own or another website. This
kind of stuff is described as internal or external linking.
Linking is a whole other issue with
lots of interesting angles to it. For example, there's
this thing called 'hot linking' which means downloading
from or viewing a part of somebody else's website from
within your own website, without the other owner's permission.
It looks like the content is on your website but it's
not. This is considered stealing content and bandwidth.
There's 'inbound' and 'outbound'
linking which means either you are linked to somebody
else's website (outbound) or somebody else has linked
their website to yours (inbound). Both links are a major,
major, major important factors in acheiving excellant
search engine results.
Relevant quality websites with good
page rankings that link back to your website give your
website alot of credibility in the search engine algorithms
and thus a higher score and placement in the seach results.
Websites that you link to that are
irrelevant to your websites' content, are poorly ranked
or banned by major search engines will harm your own website
rankings.
If you get into inbound linking
then Search Engine Optimization is incorporated into your
total web design and your linking strategy is an important
but small part of your total website strategy and design.
Rollover buttons aren't particularly
smart to use if SEO is important to you because of all
the scripting involved in the rollover button image swaps.
The third 'Click Me' image above
is the image with the code on it to go into your website
but a search engine spider can't click on it. SEO spiders
kind of crawl and creep around to see where things go
on your website.
To a spider, a 3 stage rollover
button doesn't go anywhere and so your linked web pages
get skipped and not indexed into the search engine's super
computer. This kills chances of your other pages getting
ranked in the search results for your other important
keyword areas.
