Rotating Text

[Goldman1]

I'm not sure if this is the right "Browser Side World" board to post this on, but I'm not a programmer so forgive me.

I'm thinking about redesigning my homepage. One feature I would like my homepage to have is the rotation of text and images. I sell designer furniture so I wanted to feature a different piece (probably 5 total) that changed every time someone visited the homepage. Each image would also have text associated with it that gave a brief description of the product.

Is it possible to create something like that and still have it be SE friendly? What coding language would you use?

Note: It won't be the only thing on the homepage, just part of it. So there will still be other text.

Check out dhtml for a slideshow script.

[MidiMagic]

You aren't going to sell anything by annoying the prospective customer to death with moving gee-whizzes flying all over the screen.

Give me a simple screen with no moving stuff, no text on top of images, and no popups, and I am much more likely to read the whole screen.

If there are a bunch of distracting moving objects, I hit my back button to get rid of the whizzing and spinning objects.

[MattEvans]

I think the poster wants 'rotating' (as in dynamically chosen) information rather than 'rotating' (as in rotary motion) etcs.

If you use Javascript to do this, you have to 'dupe' search engines (and non-JS browsers) by presenting at least one valid block of information by default. You can then use JS to 'swap' that block with a randomly chosen block when the page has loaded. You could probably do that with an iFrame even, to limit the need to type HTML into .js includes. There's better ways than using iFrames, but it's certainly possible.

Ideally, you'd want to do this on the server side (using PHP/ASP or similar) to present slightly different pages/pieces of content for a request based on a random number.

You shouldn't see any decline from an SEO perspective if you're doing this serverside (although you wont be able to guarantee which page version is indexed at any time). With the JS version, you'll only suffer if you don't present default (JS disabled) information, or if you don't neccessarily want the default information to be indexed.

[Gmarvz]

i think you can use this:

<script>
var whichquote=Math.round(Math.random())*3
if (whichquote<=1)
document.write('"<img src="http://yourdomain.com/image1.gif">"')
else if(whichquote<=2)
document.write('"<img src="http://yourdomain.com/image2.gif">"')
else if(whichquote<=3)
document.write('"<img src="http://yourdomain.com/image3.gif">"')
</script>