At Room 101, we recognise that it's essential to get as many people to visit your website as possible. However, the true benefit to your company comes not from casual one-time only visitors, but from those who like your website enough to bookmark it and return to view it on a regular basis. Why might someone do that? Well of course if they're interested in what you have to offer, that's a great start, but if they're revisiting every two weeks, for example, then they may find that nothing new has been added to the site since their previous visit. This can be disappointing - a website should be more like a magazine than a book - always with something new to say.

A few companies are essentially news and information based, and generate fresh content on a regular basis, but for most organisations, keeping a constant supply of new information is hard. To address this factor, we have invented something which we call a carousel. The idea is to make your website appear to have been updated more frequently than it actually has.

Imagine I have a pack of cards, and that each time someone visits the homepage, I shuffle the pack, and deal out 4 random ones. This is basically how the carousel works. What's on the cards? Try hitting the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the effect on the card image.

If you have 6 high profile clients, perhaps their photo and a small quote would make a good carousel.

"I've found Acme Ltd always service my account professionally" - Alan Knight, MP.

Or in a retail environment, these might be special offers, however, bear in mind that on each visit, the website visitor will only see some of these, so they shouldn't be crucial pieces of information, rather they should be small tidbits or icing on the cake. How many? Well, if you have 4 items, one of which is displayed each time, that's fine. Or you might have 12 items, 4 of which are shown at once.

The carousel is normally inset into a mainly static page, and is often used on your homepage. From your website visitors' point of view, it need not look like anything special, and just blends into the rest of the information on the page. Afterall, you just updated that page didn't you?!

Example: The Room101 home page has a nice example of a carousel. Hit Refresh a few times, and you'll see that the four panels surrounding the door logo change.