Article by LinksManager.com Staff - © 2009, Reproduction without permission prohibited.

The main purpose of every element on your site should be to provide something of value to human visitors, end users who can see graphics and colors, potential customers who consider the style of your site almost as important as the content in deciding whether you deserve their business.

Search-engine blogs don't rank graphics. They don't see colors or images or logos. They are absolutely, totally word oriented. That's a fact we've hammered on over and over in these articles and in various posts on the LinksManager Blog. But does that mean that the "look" of your link pages, how they are styled, is irrelevant?

Absolutely not. The main purpose of every element on your site should be to provide something of value to human visitors, end users who can see graphics and colors, potential customers who consider the style of your site almost as important as the content in deciding whether you deserve their business.

To understand this, consider your website as a house ... each page a separate but attached room. Most people prefer homes in which each room has its own personality within an overall, complimentary theme consistent from one end of the house to the other.

If that word -- theme -- transports your attention back to the World Wide Web, you're right on top of things. Themes, or skins, as they're also called, are frequently what makes the difference between attractive, easy-on-the-eyes websites and distracting, irritating sites.

Themes -- complimentary colors, type faces, boxes, menu buttons -- are, when employed correctly, what makes it possible to spend hours using applications like IE, Firefox and MS Office without getting a headache or suffering eyestrain.

As you probably already know, LinksManager can be used to create a very attractive, virtually automatic generic links page and post it on your site. It will contain your link partners' links and anchor text, categorize them any way you like, rotate them if you want, and do all sorts of other great things like invite other webmasters to submit a link for your consideration.

What it won't do without your help is perfectly integrate your links page or pages into the style -- the theme -- of your site.

For that, you need to open your LinksManager Control Panel and click on "Cosmetic Control."

There you will find this introduction:

LinksManager's COSMETIC CONTROLS allow you to create and control the design and appearance of your links pages and all support pages... NOVICE MODE allows you to select cosmetic controls using select boxes and simple form controls. If you do not know how to modify html or you are a novice who wants to make basic cosmetic changes to your default links pages, you should select NOVICE MODE.

EXPERT MODE allows you to have full cosmetic control by uploading a custom header and footer. Your header and footer can be produced from html that is already on your website... This header and footer gives you complete control over all html that is rendered above and below html generated by LinksManager. If you are a webmaster who knows basic html including how to modify your body background tag, and how to copy and paste source code from your website, you should select EXPERT MODE so you can have full control over your pages.

Yes, well. If you're really "a webmaster who knows basic html including how to modify your body background tag, and how to copy and paste source code from your website" you already know enough about formatting web pages to use EXPERT MODE without any lessons at this Linking School.

However, If modifying tags from scratch and shuffling code sounds a bit Greekish (or geekish) to you and you want to artistically integrate your link pages with the rest of the your site, check out NOVICE MODE and read on.

The first thing you'll probably notice in the "novice" panel is a list of "controls" that allow you to make changes to various aspects of your link pages, link-support pages and your links themselves.

(NOTE: Don't let the word "control" intimidate you, it actually has nothing to do with web coding or high tech. All these controls are is a set of simple commands you can use to make formatting adjustments in the same way that a volume control changes the sound level on a TV.)

Now that you're in the COSMETIC CONTROL section, before starting to play with anything, you should do two things.

First, open your site to its first links page in a separate browser tab or window. By doing this you can switch back and forth between the Cosmetic Control page you're working on and your actual web page(s) for an instant preview of the changes you're making. (Since many browsers don't automatically refresh pages, remember to hit the "reload" button to refresh the page view and see the changes.)

Second, and even more important, click on the second item on the Cosmetic Controls menu -- Cosmetic Backup/Restore -- and make a backup copy of your current settings to enable you to return from Costa Rica or Brazil with one mouse click if your changes take a sudden trip far south for any reason.

On to the actual task of customizing your Linking Section's theme. Let's begin with the most important section, the Body Controls. There you will find nine simple text boxes that allow you to use the same background, typeface (font), type size and color, and link display styles as you use on the rest of your pages.

If, for example, you use a background texture or, perhaps, a ghost image of some flowers as the background on your home page, just enter your web host link to that image into the Body Background Image box and your links page will be built with the same background. (Hint: Ignore the "Watermark" box unless you're using a copyrighted image as your background, it's mostly only useful for photographers or artists selling their work.)

All the other items on the "body" page involve color selections and are pretty self-explanatory. Here you can select colors from simple drop down lists, use the RGB Color Assistant in the Cosmetic Control section to create or match colors by eye or numerically, or match the color values of other elements on your site by using a tool like Photoshop color picker to extract their RGB color values and enter them into the appropriate boxes on the Body Control page.

You have now completed designing the basic theme -- colors, type faces, link colors -- that will run across your whole collection of links-related pages; pages that that invite people to submit a link, modify a link, select a link, etc.

The other seven selections on the Cosmetic Control page allow to you to make structural changes -- things like adding or deleting categories and rewriting your titles and descriptions -- as well as design changes in your pages.

Since this article is about integrating your links pages into your site's overall graphic theme, we'll assume you're happy with your current titles, text and organization and are only interested in customizing your design.

One thing you will quickly notice is that virtually all the settings in these sections give you the option of entering color, size and typeface selections in simple text boxes or through the addition of CSS style sheets. While it's true that creating (or extracting) and using style sheets will enable you make your links pages more elaborate, most Novice users would be well advised to stick to working within the text boxes. If, however, you know something about style sheets and wish to experiment with them, be sure to first click the "more info" link at the end of each style sheet select line and read the explanation that follows.

Without style sheets, you simply make selections from the drop down boxes, check them in your browser as described above and click "Save Changes" at the bottom of each page when you've got it the way you want it.

With LinksManager, what would otherwise be something very complex -- making your links pages bear a reasonable resemblance to the rest of your site's family of pages-- is neither rocket nor computer science. It's more like following the dots. It's also foolproof as long as the "fool" in question remembers to periodically backup his or her existing settings with the Cosmetic Backup/Restore tool along the way. (Hint: It's a good idea to backup your work each time you've finished changing a module, that way if you have to do a restore you won't need to start over making changes from the beginning.)

Finally, if you do get to a point where you feel you're just not understanding something perfectly, don't hesitate to check out the knowledge base articles, support data and Help Desk contact information located under Support Options at the bottom left of the opening Control Panel page.

At LinksManager, we are proud to be into our second decade of making customer service Priority One.