Network Solutions is, I’m sure, a spectacular company to work for, and they have some very satisfied customers.  These facts will not sway my opinion of the company, however.  They’ve been around since the Internet world was dank, dark hole peopled by troll-nerds in basement caves with green and amber monochrome monitors, and memory was denoted by the letter “K” instead of “M” or “G” (which may be the source of the problems I’m about to outline).

Today, I’m attempting to set up a client with a test site so that they can see the superiority of a content management system over their existing static website.  It’s a redesign job that, when I took it, looked like a few fun hours at the office.  In retrospect, I’m going to start charging a “NetSol” fee…

Cute, huh?

That’s right, they’re hosted at Network Solutions (but then, I’ll bet you guessed that already).  So, they’ve given me the accesses I need to make the changes I need to make, and all should be well, right?  Wrong…

I followed every link on their site to find information which should be displayed on the main account management page (even in a little ajax pop-up would be nice).  After an hour, I decided to call the support number which thankfully is prominent.  I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s had difficulty finding something on their site.  Even their site search turns up nothing useful.  Two words, NetSol…  Usability Study…  Perform one. You have the money, and the technology.

I understand, it’s Saturday, so I can’t expect instant service, but I spent 27 minutes on hold, waiting for a customer service rep.  No too awful, except for the fact that the only song in the hold music cue is Pachelbel’s Cannon in D Major.  Once through is enough, but as a divorced man I can think of some pretty bad punk rock I’d rather hear than that tune.

Here’s a piece of advice for anyone with a call center.  If you are likely to have anyone on hold for more than say, five minutes, try playing up Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  I can’t think of a single person who would consider slitting his wrists to stop hearing it, and it likely won’t remind anyone of a wedding.  Not only that, but it’s long if you play the whole thing.  It’ll help pass the time for those 45 minute waits.  When my tech finally did answer, I told her my issue, and her reply puzzled me.  She said, “Oh, your problem is that we do not host that domain.”  Really?  That’s funny, because a quick whois and traceroute says you do.  Not to mention the account information I’m looking at in your account manager…

For some companies, it seems like all their website efforts are aimed at making a sale, and once the sale is made, you’re on your own.  Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and pretty much all the big registrars do exactly that.  The constant up-sell attempts and general lack of post purchase information on their websites is enough to make even the ardent customer groan.  The benefit of GoDaddy is, their site is tacky, busy and loud, so you expect it.  That and the convenient “skip to the end” button when you just want a domain name.  Incidentally, GoDaddy’s hosting is terrible from a technical standpoint as well (maybe more on that later).

If you have an account with Network Solutions, please tell me that you’ve had an easier time finding anything or reaching a technical support representative (and I don’t necessarily mean on the phone.  I mean really reaching them and having them understand your question).  If not, it’ll just cement what I’m saying here.

I, for one, am tired of constant up-sell attempts.  I understand the need for a company to make money, but not everyone needs your stupid website builder, and pretty much no one needs 90% of the other useless crap you try to push on those unsuspecting clients who don’t know the game as well as those of us who are in it.

For prospective clients of any designer or developer…  Have written into your contract the registration of a domain name and procurement of hosting.  Make the contract say you own it, and can switch it at any time, but let them do the work of setting it all up.  That way, you’ll get exactly what you need, and avoid something you’ll regret later (like a half hour of your life lost to Cannon).

I’m not bitter, but I do hope the “let me make a purchase and I’ll let you know if I need anything else” idea catches on.  There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep clicking “no” to other special offers.  As the perfect topper to the support conversation, my tech’s last question to me was, “May I assist you in adding another domain to your account?”

No, dear.  No you may not…

This is another political site that was done using WordPress.  Gary manages the campaign of the last political site I did.  The background employs very wide (1400 px) jpgs that have a fabric texture, and a little CSS3 for those of you that use a real browser like Firefox 3.5 or Safari (in case you missed it, that’s a jab at those of you who still use IE). The site should display right in IE (as old as 7), though without the pretty font we chose.

We managed to get the image size for the site (the stuff that loads for each page by default to 133K.  That’s pretty small considering.

I’m not affiliated with a political party, but it seems Republicans hire me.  What’s wrong Democrats?  I don’t bite.

Comments and feedback (constructive) appreciated.

Gary M. Collins

This site is yet another WordPress implementation making heavy use of template files and custom scripts per page.  WordPress seems ideally suited for political campaigns and political websites for it’s simplicity and ease of maintenance.  The idea with this site was to make it look professional and make use of social technologies which politicians are starting to realize are necessary and smart.

We made heavy use of CSS  in this design, as well as moderate JavaScript (which means, IE6 users need not apply).  We departed slightly from the original design I supplied, but I think we arrived at a decent compromise.  One of the goals was small image sizes, so PNG’s are used where they are needed, but 92% JPG’s are used for the big stuff.  The navigation bar at the top was intended to look inset, and to show the capitol building in the background through itself.  Thank the Internet gods for transparent PNG’s right?

Feel free to let me know what you think (good or bad).  Some of you are smarter than I am, and your (constructive) feedback is always appreciated.

Lawless for Maryland

I’ve often wondered why it is that people don’t understand the axiom, “You get what you pay for.”  People who don’t understand a process universally seem drawn to the lowest price.  In the case of a known quantity, such as a car purchase, it makes sense.  If you’re in the market for an iPod, you don’t necessarily need to know how an iPod works to buy one.  You can rest assured that the one you buy is almost exactly like the others of the same model.

What about an unknown quantity?  What if you house needs painted, or you want to have that iPod we talked about repaired?  Now we come to an issue.  You can go with the place that offers the lowest price, and you may get lucky.  Odds are, however, that you will get what you paid for.  About 60% of my clients are what I like to call re-treads.  What does that mean exactly?  It simply means that they went the cheap route and decided it was too expensive.  Write this down.

Price is only an issue in the absence of value.

I don’t know who originally said it, but I’d love to meet him.  Did you write it down?  Well, go back and do it.  I’ll wait…

Future design re-tread

I recently had a conversation with a future client who fell victim to this all-to-common issue.  She went with a guy who talked the talk, but when challenged played the non-disclosure card.  He kept telling her that he couldn’t show her examples of artistic work and SEO results because of competition issues.  This is absolute hooey, but sounds good when you’re on the receiving end.  She has recently decided that the bargain route was too expensive.

Many potential web design clients have the “instant gratification” mentality.  They think that arriving at a good design is a trivial matter that can be accomplished in an afternoon.  This is FAR from the case.  Being able to work Photoshop makes a person a designer the same way knowing which end of a screwdriver to turn makes one a mechanic.  I can do some amazing things with Photoshop and Illustrator, but many of them make for bad design.  The difference between a designer and a hack is knowing the difference.

What happens in nearly every re-tread case is, they eat up most of their budget on the bad design and have to pick and choose features for the re-design.  Here’s a quick list of things to help you avoid this problem.

1. Do your homework: Look at the designer’s portfolio.  If there is no portfolio, don’t hire that designer.  If the portfolio looks like it contains a bunch of work from the late 90’s, don’t hire.  If you don’t like what you see in the portfolio, don’t hire.  Ask for references.  No references…  Well, you get the point.
2. Expect good communication: If you don’t get a return call or e-mail within a reasonable time, assume this will be the norm.  If you value communication, hold out for a good communicator.  Some techies have bad people skills.  This should be pretty easy to spot.
3. Sign a contract: Would you let a builder start construction on a house without one?  So why wouldn’t you do the same for a HUGE part of your business?  If you don’t sign a contract, you’re dealing with an amateur (on both sides).
4. If you see a design menu with prices, run: Pre published price lists may seem like a good idea, but you get the same results as walking into a tattoo studio and picking a tattoo off the wall.  It isn’t yours, and it isn’t unique to your business.
5. Ask questions, expect honest answers: No one knows how to do everything.  If you find a designer who can’t do everything you want, odds are he can sub-contract the parts he’s not good at.  It shouldn’t matter to you, but disclosure should.  Find out what your designer’s strengths and weaknesses are.  We all have them.  If we didn’t, you wouldn’t need a designer.  Remember, if the answers you get sound like BS, they probably are.
6. Know the difference between Design and Development: Designers typically do the visual part.  Developers typically make the site do things.  Don’t hire one to do the other.  Again, ask for the one you really need.
7. Don’t hire a relative: Ever…  Even if it’s free…  Enough said.
8. Tables are dead: No modern designer worth his salt uses tables.  If your designer doesn’t use CSS for layout, you’ll need to redesign very soon anyway.
9. Expect to pay for services rendered: Asking a designer to “whip something up” and let you take a look so you can decide is like asking a restaurant to make you a meal and let you pay for it if you like it.  What would you expect the waiter to tell you if you asked a question like that?
10. Don’t make hasty decisions: The statement, “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine” should be taken to heart.  Think things through and realize that there is time to do it right.  If there isn’t, you’ll invariably have to do it again.

You don’t have to hire me, but please, hire someone competent.  I have a list…  If you don’t understand the above, ask me.  There’s a handy little “comment” block at the bottom of this page.  Use it.  Is there something else you want to know?  Ask.  There’s also a contact form you can use if you don’t want anyone to see what you’re saying.  Feel free to go that route.

I’ve decided to put up images I’ve made that people have decided not to use for whatever reason.  If you see something you like, you can either contact me to buy / modify it.  This one is a button that I like the look of, but didn’t fit the idea the client had for his site.  It’s a glassy button using a font that is made to resemble an eye.  If you can think of a purpose for it, let me know.

Button with an “E” in it

If you own or are considering a website, you’ve probably heard the terms Search Engine Optimization or SEO about a thousand times.  The term (so long as you know what the letters stand for) is self explanatory.  Optimizing your website for search engines sounds like a good idea, as most people still find what they’re looking for using a search engine.  SEO is as much an art as it is a science, and the experts are usually not that far above the folks who do common sense things as far as results.  This makes it confusing, and more than a little intimidating to new folks in the web realm.  Before you pay the possible $50,000 to an SEO pro, let’s talk about how to make sense of it, shall we?  Here are four simple rules (or suggestions).

SEO isn’t as confusing as you might think

Rule 1:  Search engines read text.  If your site has no text, search engines don’t know how to find you.  Examples?  OK, any site done entirely in Flash is an example of a difficult to optimise site (notice I didn’t say impossible).  Flash, while pretty and cool looking when done properly,  is practically useless when it comes to search engines.  I’m not saying not to use flash, I’m saying to use it sparingly.  More on that in another post.

There is also a segment of web artists who try to be all things to their clients, yet lack the skill set of writing CSS.  They tend to leave buttons as images and / or embed text in images.  This is fine if you do it properly but if you do it wrong, no search engine traffic.  It’s far better to use style sheets and text in every place you can.

Rule 2:  Search engines have customers too.  Odds are, you have a website as an extension of your business.  If so, you have customers (or want some).  As a business, you provide your customers what they want.  If you didn’t, they wouldn’t stay customers for long.  Search engines are the same.  Searchers come to them to find the page most relevant their search.  If engines sent searchers to pages that had nothing to do with their search, you guessed it…  The searcher wouldn’t come back to that engine.

How does this information help or hurt you?  Well, Google, for instance, puts a lot of time and energy into making sure the results to searches are accurate and relevant.  This means that they find all the ways people cheat the system and make their search engine ignore those people (or actively shun them).  That way, the searcher finds his 18th century Amish swimwear and not a site about how to make a billion dollars in ten minutes on the Internet.  Make your content match your audience (after a few weeks, this post might rank for Amish swimwear).

Rule 3:  Get your link out there.  Every blog post you read, comment on it (including this one).  Every forum you visit, leave a comment (constructive).  In the comments section of most blogs and forums, there is either a slot to type your website, or a signature block in which you can type your address.  Put your web address in your e-mail signature, on your business card, carve it into a tree…  Just get it out there.  What does this have to do with SEO?  Search engines count the number of links back to your site.  More = good, and your rank goes up the more you post.  Enough said.

Rule 4:  Don’t stress about SEO.  Take a more Taoist approach to it.  If you want more organic search traffic, write more about your topics of interest.  Nothing is more relevant to search engines than a well written article on the subject a searcher is looking for.  What this means is, if your website does not have a blog, you’re wrong.  Blogs are the best way to get free traffic, and I’d go so far as to say building your site on a blog engine is one of the smartest things you could do.  WordPress handles 90% of the SEO stuff for you, so why not take advantage?

This is a cursory overview of what I do for SEO, and I get a lot of first page Google results for very little time investment.  I do it as a part of all the sites I design, and on whatever CMS my client uses. What do you do?  I’d love to hear about it (even if you think I’m an idiot, and I’m doing it wrong).  If you have anything to add, feel free to do so in the comment block below.

I believe the idea behind this site is to turn it into a place where people can tell their story while maintaining anonymity (or telling all, as the case may be).  The look was to be simple, classy and not flashy.  I basically laid it out with the idea of making the content area look like a piece of rounded glass suspended over a blue surface.  It turned out the way I expected.

As per the way business has gone lately, it’s a WordPress blog theme.  I love working with WordPress, and so do my clients.  They get up and running fast with an elegant looking design, and they can put whatever they want on it with a very shallow learning curve.  If you are paying someone for updates, you owe it to yourself to look into WordPress.

Local Stalker — A website dedicated to eradication of stalking

I’ve developed a lot of websites over the years, for a lot of people.  I’ve developed them for people who were serious about making them work, and I’ve done them for people who were just dipping their toe in the Internet pool.  What I’ve learned is, people with no goals when it comes to the on-line experience won’t last long.  I’ve done some spectacular work for people who lost interest after the fact, not because I wasn’t there to help them along the way, but because they didn’t know what they were doing there in the first place.

So, to that end, let’s discuss what it takes to write a good post or page.  Having a process will make it easier to justify doing it when the time comes and prevent you from becoming a statistic.  This goes for whatever system you adopt, but will make the most sense to WordPress users.  The process I use is simple.

1. Get an idea
2. Write the post
3. Come up with a clever title
4. Link to anything pertinent in the article
5. Pick keywords to add as tags
6. Write a compelling excerpt
7. Make a search engine friendly title and description (for your SEO plugin)
8. Publish

Thankfully, it’s not done the old fashioned way

First, you’ll need an idea.  If you’re anything like me, ideas come at the most inopportune times.  When that happens, write the idea down.  Trust me on this.  If you don’t, you’ll regret it when someone else beats you to the punch.  Where ideas come from is a matter of philosophy for some people.  I just listen to the questions my clients are asking and answer them in a post.  Pretty simple if you ask me.  It makes me look smarter than I am, and makes them happy I took the time to help.  It’s a win-win.

Next, you need to make time to actually write the text and get it ready for prime time.  I find that it’s nearly always best to just brain dump.  Don’t let your internal editor tell you that you forgot to throw in a comma, or missed an “s” in a word.  None of that matters in a first draft.  Aside from that, if you installed the plugin “After the Deadline” like I said you should, it’ll catch the silly mistakes we all make.  I’m not great at spelling, and I forget to make my verbs agree with their subjects from time to time.  That’s why we proofread (at least some of us do).

Make a clever title.  It should be something that will entice people to read.  No matter how good your work is, if no one reads it, it isn’t good to anyone.  If you have a choice between an article with a title like “Economics And The Impact Of Corn” or “CORN! It Does An Economy Good,” which one are you more likely to read (neither, I know…  bad example)?

Now, you’ve written a great article and a clever title, you’ve proofed it and you’re ready to find stuff to link.  If you installed Zemanta (or another comparable plugin), linking is a snap.  If not, do it by hand.  If you referred to a post you’ve written before, link to it.  If you’ve referred to a blog or website you respect, link to it.  If you’ve referred to a book…  You guessed it.  Taking the time to do so will increase your readership.  Not taking the time is kind of lazy.

After you’ve linked, you need to tag.  Not tagging is a common mistake.  Tags make a post more easily found, and they help search engines as well as people figure out how to place the article.  Once again, installing Zemanta (and no, they aren’t paying me to say so) helps make this process easier.  It won’t find all the words you want, but three is better than none.  You shouldn’t tag more than about seven things anyway.  Tag.  You’ll be glad you did.

The next thing to do is add an excerpt.  Why should I bother with an excerpt, you say?  Even if your theme doesn’t make use of an excerpt, neglecting to add it is a mistake.  Without going into too much technical detail, it is used in places you can’t necessarily see.  To make it easy, you can simply copy and paste the most compelling paragraph in your article into the excerpt block.  If you want to take a more productive approach, write a paragraph that would make you want to read the article if you found it on Google.  Do it, even if you don’t want to.

You should have installed Platinum SEO or All-In-One SEO (I prefer Platinum for reasons to be explained in another post).  If not, do it.  This will add a block to the end of your post / page editor which allows you to make a search engine friendly title and description for your shiny new article.  This is not the place to write all flowery and clever.  Machines don’t care about your prose.  They care about how relevant your article is to their visitors’ searches.  Make your title and description reflect this.  Also, don’t bother with putting in keywords.  No real search engines even read a keyword tag anymore so using it is a waste of time.  Put in Keywords only on the home page so that Ask.com doesn’t feel left out.

Finally, pick a good time to publish it.  Feel free to sit on the article for a day.  The best bet is to wait a day and re-read what you wrote.  You’ll find that waiting to publish lets you avoid certain mistakes you would otherwise have made (especially if you enjoyed a few alcoholic beverages while writing the previous day).

This is a long article, but it can help you generate useful content your readers will actually want to finish reading.  Go forth, write…

I routinely check web viewing trends as far as what browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions the bulk of the web is using.  I feel it’s part of any designer / UI -  UX engineer’s job to do so.  Sometimes the trends make me happy, like the most recent ones about IE6 (the bane of all web design existence).  IE6 is now at about 12% market share.  What this means is, as designers, we can finally stop writing hacks to make sites work properly in it.  I digress…

One of the main reasons to continuously check is to make sure we, in the industry, are doing right by our clients in what we recommend.   Several years ago, it was standard practice to design fixed width sites (sites that don’t adjust for the width of the screen) that worked well with 800 x 600 screen resolution.  Why?  Because a huge number of screens used it.  These days, less than 4% of screens use this resolution so it makes no sense to design for those people (if that’s you and you don’t live in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s time to move up).  This brings me to the point of the article.

Pretty, ain’t it?

You may not know what a screen resolution is, or why it’s important.  You don’t need to.  My job is to help you understand how it affects you.  As of January of 2009, over 93% of browsers use a screen resolution of 1024 pixels (think of them as dots) wide or greater.  Once again, happy news.  This cements the idea that a fixed width layout can be designed to fit neatly within this screen resolution.  The 960 Grid is a simple CSS framework (I know, big technical jargony words again.  I promise to explain) which makes use of almost the entire screen width of a browser on a 1024 pixel wide screen.

What is CSS?  It stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  CSS is a set of instructions to your browser that explains how it should display the parts of a page.  Some browsers are smart (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and sometimes Safari) and some are really, extremely, very stupid (IE6 and increasingly, IE8).  They all have quirks, but some are better than others at the important stuff.  Their intelligence is derived from the way they handle standard CSS.  There’s a whole science to making certain browsers understand what should be simple instructions, but that’s another story for another day.

So, 960 pixels doesn’t sound like 1024, does it?  There is a good reason for that.  If you look to your right you’ll see a vertical scroll bar.  That takes up between 20 and 30 pixels depending on your browser and your operating system settings.  Now we’re down to 1004 — 994 pixels.  There is sometimes a bit of a border around the browser window which sucks up more space.  Let’s assume a happy medium of 999 pixels of viewable space.  That gives us what’s called a trough (an area of nothing) on either side of the content that’s about 15 pixels wide.  That’s perfect.  What about on my 1680 pixel wide screen, you ask?  Well, there is a significant difference in the trough, but it still looks nice.

When it comes to usability, 960 will cover most of the bases unless you happen to be HavenWorks.com.  That site is broken.  When designing a site on a 960 grid, there are lots of options.  You can set a background image that takes up some of that white space on larger screens, you can make it two columns, three columns and in rare cases, four columns.  You can do all this and still leave a enough space for a little margin between the columns.  Look at the home page of this site as an example.  It’s a three column layout while the subsequent pages are two.

The 960 grid system works well for most applications.  Do I use it exclusively?  No.  Some designers do, but there are reasons not to.  Mostly they revolve around target audience.  For most applications, the 960 grid works for web design.  This will likely be the case until 1024 pixel wide screens go away and are replaced by 1280 (or something else).  Talk to me about what would be right for your site.

For some reason my clients always have weird requirements for pages.  Thankfully, WordPress has a way.  I remember reading a post on a forum recently where a user asked the question, “I created a Page and on that Page I want to list all posts in a specified category. How do I do this?”  Naturally, one user decided to tell the guy it was impossible and that he should just stick to the status quo.  This post is more for that doofus than it is for the guy who asked.

First, you need to know a few things about the way WordPress finds all the pretty things it displays.  If code makes you wince and or recoil in fear, first, grow up, and second, use the famous “cut, copy, paste” features we all know and love.

If you’re over it, we’ll move on…

The goal here is to list all the posts in a specific category on a page which you need to create.  Let’s take a useful example like a portfolio.  It could be a portfolio of images or words (or both).  The assumption here is that you won’t change the text at the top / bottom, or that there won’t be any, and that you have such a category with posts in it already.  This will make the process easier.

Either use a dev copy of your site, or backup before doing this stuff (or any stuff you read from some random stranger on the intertubes).

Open your favorite text editor (not Word) and create a file called portfolio.php (or whatever you want to call it) and make it look like this.

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Portfolio
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content">

</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Notice that we have all the elements of a good PHP page here, but the thing WordPress cares about is the “Template Name: Portfolio” bit. Change this to whatever you want to call this template.

Next, we have to add a few scripty things to it to make it pull information from the database and display it according to what we’re after.  We’ll need a call to the database here.  We want to select only posts of a specific category, in this case the portfolio category.  For me, the portfolio category is 25, but you can find yours by clicking the edit link to your desired category in the category manager and looking at the last number in the URL.  The reason you want to use the category ID number instead of the name is, on the off chance that you change the name, your new page becomes useless.  The ID won’t ever change.

The ‘showposts=10′ thing is the maximum number of posts I want to appear on the portfolio page. Change that to whatever number you like, up to and including several thousand (though I don’t recommend that).  We follow up the query with a little “while” loop so that we can cycle through the results.

<?php query_posts('showposts=10&cat=25'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

At this point, we have a few choices to make.  Do we want to display everything, or just a few things?  As a portfolio, we’d likely want to display an image, be it a thumbnail or a full sized image.  We may want to display text, but we certainly want a link.  So, the variables (stuff) we have to work with are as follows:

• the_permalink() — the permalink to the post in question
• the_title() — the unbelievably clever title you gave your post
• the_excerpt() — the excerpt that I know you’re using because it’s smart to do
• the_thumbnail() — it’s…  well… the primary thumbnail image
• the_images() — all the images in the post
• the_content() — the body of your post

Since we’re not after content we can skip that, but we may want to make use of the excerpt to entice readers to click on the pretty pictures.  It’s up to you.  let’s use the bare minimum for this tutorial and just go with images and links (and titles for XHTML compliance).  We’re going to style this with divs, and you can make them look however you want by either using existing classes or writing new ones in your style.css file.  For now, they’ll be plain and however the browser wants to drop them.

<div> /* This DIV could be a SPAN or nothing depending on how you want it to display  */
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_thumbnail(); ?></a>
</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Putting it all together it should look like this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Portfolio
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content">
/* If you want to add a heading or text, do it here */
<?php query_posts('showposts=10&cat=25'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_thumbnail(); ?></a>
</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>
/* If you want text below your gallery, do it here */
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

You can play with it and add more formatting, add text, or do whatever you want.  After you have it the way you want it, upload it to your active theme’s root directory then add a new page.  In the templates box at the bottom of the right column, you should see your newly created template as an option.  You need not add any text to the content block, simply save it as a draft or view it and you should see your portfolio as a cluster of clickable thumbnails.

Hit me with questions or comments (especially if I typo’d or left something vague).