Come back here to see new features that we have in our website designs.

Server Widgets

You may be familiar with widgets of all types that provide some special functionality on your site.  A familiar one is the ability to embed a YouTube video on your site.  Embedding is simply taking the HTML code provided for you and pasting that into your site's HTML.  Using our editor this is very easy to do and available to all our customers directly from their web browsers.  Widgets typically invoke a flash object and possibly download javascript from the widget's site to perform some magic and present you with the functionality.

However we also have another type of widget.  We call these "Server Widgets".  The server widgets differ in that they invoke special code directly on our server to insert something into your web page and having that appear as normal HTML in the browser.  The box to the right is an example of this.  It is a blog feed server widget where the webserver extracts the latest from someone's blog and displays a summary on your webpage.

Having enhanced text on your website is a sure way to make it classy!  Unfortunately HTML and the web browsers cannot do this.  You are restricted to a set of standard font families that you can be sure will be available on every system and beyond size you can't do anything fancy.  Fancy text can only be displayed on a website using an image or with a flash document.  Once upon a time the only way to do this was to call your webmaster or graphics artist and ask them to create an image for you -- we won't even talk about flash.  Industrious website owners have figured out that they can purchase a product such as Adobe's Photoshop and generate the images themselves.

Now there is a much better way.  On websites hosted at Fred's Used Websites you can generate enhanced text as easily as typing in regular text.  You can select a fancier font, use a single color for the font or specify a different color for the stroke (font outline) and the fill, add a drop shadow, and decide the direction and how pronounced the shadow will be!

All you need to do is use our editor from your browser, select the text you want to enhance, then click on the "Set/Edit Enhanced Text" button () on the editor panel.  There are defaults for font, font size, shadow settings, etc. that will produce nicely enhanced text.  From there you can just change parameters in the dialog box and watch the preview pane until you have it the way you want.  If you like a particular style, we can even make that the default for your website!

rop caps is another way to enhance the look of your paragraphs on your web pages.  This feature is also available to you directly in the editor you access with your browser!  As with enhanced text, the Drop Cap letter is rendered on the server directly so you don't need any kind of application to make them.  When in the editor, just put your cursor in the paragraph and click the "Toggle Drop Cap" () button to get the default you have set for your website.  If you don't like the way it looks or you decide you have too many just click it again to restore you paragraph to its initial look.

How much does this cost, you ask?  All our website clients get this feature as a standard part of the hosting package!  Wanna see how it works for yourself?  Go to our sample edit page and try for yourself!!

Image Galleries

We have extended the slide show capability we have had for some time and now have an excellent way for artists to showcase and sell your work!  We can create a gallery on your site which is very easy for you to manage.  You are able to create as many galleries as you wish each containing a series of images.  Each image has extra information you can add directly to give it a title, describe, or have a purchase button.  You can upload new images and modify its information without ever leaving your website!

For each gallery you can have a thumbnail view and a slideshow view.  The slideshow view can do a fullscreen show of you artwork with music!  The thumbnail view lets your visitors click on a thumbnail to see the larger image.  We can configure your gallery to automatically watermark your images or just disable the right-click to save.

Go to our example gallery to see what is possible, then go to Fenton's Fine Art to see a real example!

Classified Advertisements

Are you part of an organization?  You could use your website to promote items your members have for sale!  Perhaps your company would like to provide a way for your employees to advertise items they want to buy, sell, or trade with other employees.  Add want ads to your website easily with this feature!   This can easily be configured to allow your users to freely advertise or you can charge them.

You can allow ads to run for a block of time such as one or two weeks or setup other creative running periods such as every Friday for a month, each last Monday of the month for a year, every Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday for the next two months.

Check out a live demo of this feature or see a real example!

Slide show

We can present your photographs as a slide show on your web page.  Not only can you view the show as a content area on a web page, but you can also make this go full screen with just a click.  View this in action by looking at this sample slide show presentation .  

Showcase your products!

Would you like to showcase a large number of products or other items but don't really need a shopping cart?  We have developed a web feature that allows you to enter any number of these items into a database.  For each item you can create a full page, or simply  enter a description and a couple of images.  These items can then be associated with a primary group as well as secondary groups.

Groups have similar characteristics as items in that you can create a full page for each or simply enter a description.  You can see this in action on Debbie Dadey's website to showcase her books.  In this configuration Debbie is promoting approximately 140 books.  Each book belongs to a particular series but there are several other groupings such as seasonal books, new books, etc.  Make this feature work for you!  Call us for an estimate.

Live Feeds from your Site

Do you want your site to take advantage of Live Bookmarks in Firefox and Netscape browsers, Feeds in the new Internet Explorer 7, or the many other ways you can feed information from your site using RSS Feeds?  Our sites are easily configured to generate RSS feeds that can be used for applications that use Live Feeds or for search engines.

Try it out if you have Firefox, Netscape 8, or Internet Explorer 7.   Look for the  on your browser's tool or address bar and click --or- click on the feed button here to see the feed from Fred's Used Websites.

Contact him:
E-mail at Fred@FredsUsedWebsites.com
Call 970-663-4184 or 310-909-8624