Moving on to gif files. Gif is used for graphics that have areas of flat color, like palm tree you made in your paint program. Read manual, and check out your paint program. You might have a paint program from which you can save or export gif files.

If your paint program won’t export art work as gif, no problem. Print your art work out at a high resolution on good paper and scan it at 72, size it, and save or export it as gif 89a. If your software just says “gif,” I think you can safely assume it is gif89a unless your software is very old.

There is one important distinction between gif and jpg. In jpg, you must be sure that your photo fills picture window after you scan. If there is white space around or on any side of photo, crop it off, or it will show up on web. But in gif89a, background of your picture will be transparent. So, if you scan your palm tree on its white background and save it as gif, what will appear on web is just palm tree. jpg would show a palm tree on a white rectangle.

While saving or exporting in jpg, you had a choice of quality for your finished product. In gif, you have no quality choice, but you may have a choice of number of colors to be used. The fewer colors, smaller file. So again, experiment with saving or exporting your artwork with different numbers of colors until your arrive at a satisfactory graphic with as few colors as possible.

There are really just three things you need to know:

1. jpg is for graphics that are photographs or like photographs. 2. gif is for everything else. 3. All graphics should be created in smallest possible file size.

Got it? Go create!

One more thing... Keep It Fresh! Constantly update information on your site. Let your visitors know this too. They will want to bookmark your pages if they understand that next week there will be even more of what they are looking for.

FREE RESOURCES

Give something of value to your visitors. Ideally, you should strive to offer something that is unique and of great interest to your target audience.

Following are some of methods that we have recently employed and found to be exceptional at keeping traffic on our site longer and bringing them back again and again.

Free Internet Marketing “How To” Reports, Free Audio Training Reports, Entertaining (but fast loading) FLASH Video, Links to other Resources, Newsletter/Ezine, A Book Store, Free Advice, A Chat Room with Voice capabilities, Free Classified Ads. Internal Banner Exchanger

Some of these features work so well that other webmasters are emailing to ask if they can offer links directly to them. Many other sites have voluntarily republished many of our original reports too.

EMAIL CONTACT

In every email communication that you send out you should be promoting your site. After you sign your name make sure to add a hot link to your site. A short ad or signature file is also quite acceptable in most messages.

Even though we just mentioned newsletters and ezines, they merit special mention. Currently there is no better way to bring large amounts of previous visitors back to your site than to stay in touch with them via email.

Encourage all your visitors to sign up for your newsletter so that you can remind them of features of your web pages. Of course you will have to provide quality content in your Ezine as well.

There are many other methods to keep your visitors clicking back to you. But with these five suggestions you should be well equipped to receive that much sought after ‘repeat traffic’.