Chapter 15: Ten Cool Gizmos for Your Web Site

If you're ready to take your Web site beyond the ordinary to include some of the cool stuff you see on the Web, this chapter is for you. Here are ten great gizmos that increase your site's utility and "wow" factor. Many of these tools are free, and the rest are relatively cheap. We also give you a rundown on ways to replace the functionality of the most popular FrontPage Web components, or bots. Former FrontPage users loved how easy bots were to use, but they didn't make it into Expression Web because the code they generated wasn't up to standards muster.

Some gizmos mentioned in this chapter work by simply linking to a file or URL. Others provide ready-to-go-code that you embed, or plop into your page's HTML to make them work. For example, YouTube allows you to link to a video on the YouTube Web site or embed the video in your site so that it plays in a box right on your page. (We tell you more about YouTube later in this chapter.) To create a link, use any of the techniques we outline in Chapter 4. To embed code in your page's HTML, in Design view, place your cursor in the location you want the gizmo to appear. Then look in Code view (or in the code portion of Split view) for the blinking cursor. That's the location in your code that matches the spot on your page. You place the gizmo code right in that spot.

Search Locally or Worldwide-Web-ly

Give your Web visitors the option of searching both the World Wide Web and your Web site by including Google Free WebSearch and SiteSearch on your home page. You can add a miniature Google search box similar to the one on the Google home page, or you can customize the box to blend with your site's color scheme.

Adding Google searching to your site is a simple matter of dropping a chunk of code into your page's HTML in the location you want the search box to appear on the page.

Visit http://www.google.com/searchcode.html for details.