Rotating Banner Ads; Shopping Carts; META Tag Update

By David Fiedler and Scott Clark

Dear Dr. Website: How can we add rotating graphical banner ads to our site?
It depends on what programming language you want to use. If you use Perl, there are several free scripts to do the job, such as Free N Share Ad, which randomly displays banner images and takes users to the correct URL. MeySoft's Rotating Banner Ads uses HTML forms to let members submit data, check statistics, and update their account profiles. If you use JavaScript, try Ad Banner Rotation, which rotates banners at variable time intervals. All of these scripts are free from ScriptSearch.
And there are several commercial tools available, such as Central Ad, priced from $30 to $159 and available for Windows NT and Unix. AdGenie retails for $295, and also runs on NT and Unix.
Dear Dr. Website: The multimedia firm I work for recently created a site for a client in Microsoft FrontPage. In Explorer, the page looks fine. In Netscape, there's a line straight through the middle. The page is split into two frames and uses tables for the images. Can you help me get rid of this line?
Place the following parameters within the BODY tag of both of your framed pages:
LEFTMARGIN="0" TOPMARGIN="0"
MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0"
This won't do anything in IE, but in Netscape, it brings the images and tables into the proper position to get rid of the line.
Dear Dr. Website: I am trying to find a program that will let me create a client-side JavaScript shopping cart. I am aware of one called JShop Pro, made in England. Do you know of any other programs? And have you heard anything about JShop Pro?
ScriptSearch has many free and commercial JavaScript shopping carts, including Whorl's popular JShop Pro. JShop used to be free, but it now costs $168. Be aware that though these aforementioned programs are based on JavaScript, many utilize a server-based CGI script for forms processing, so choose accordingly.
Dear Dr. Website: I just finished reading your articles on META tags. I then went to three major search engines, entered the same search words, and found that the top five listings on all engines were pages with very little, if any, META tag data. Your diagnosis?
Just when you think you know what's going on, the search engines change their rules for searching. Some recent changes have affected things so greatly that even so-called search engine placement firms are worried.
The problem is that META tags alone cannot guarantee that your pages will always be on top. Believe it or not, the actual content of your page has a lot to do with it. This is one reason for the success of Yahoo, which picks its links by hand. META tags will not help your site on Yahoo at all.
With that said, remember that new ways of dealing with the massive amount of information on the Web are constantly being thought up, so it's never a waste of time to have accurate META tags.

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