One of the bad things about linking to other web sites is that you encourage your visitors to leave your site and never return. Site abandonment is one of the chief reasons people lose traffic, leads and sales.

ALE or Awesome Link Effects is a new way to provide links to other sites but still keep your visitor on your own site. It's a very clever use of various scripting techniques that absolutely anyone, no matter what your technical experience, can implement quickly and easily.

To get started, you simply copy the ALE files to your web server and then open the main page in your browser. ALE uses a combination of cascading file sheets, JavaScript and PHP to accomplish its tricks, but you don't need to know how to do anything more than copy and paste! 

The premise behind ALE is that rather than send your visitor to another site when they click a link, a new browser window is layered over the existing one -- kind of like pulling down a temporary transparent windows shade over your web page. The linked site is displayed in the foreground and your site remains in the background. 

There are six different ALE effects you can use ranging from a simple display of one web page over another to giving the visitor the ability to move back and forth through several sites while your web site remains in the background.

The visitor can close this top window at any time they want to return to your site behind it.

You can even use ALE to present a slide show of images and allow your visitor to move back and forth through the show and close it at any time to return to your site in the background.

ALE has some very practical applications. For instance, if you are an affiliate marketer, you can link to affiliate products without losing your traffic. If you sell ebooks or software, you can link to an excerpt or demo of your product while still keeping your sales page up in the background. Or you could include helpful information about your site or a slideshow of your latest trip. And if you have a very crowded web page with lots of videos or images, you could open your videos or images in another  window. The applications are limitless and ALE is easy to use. You can see a full demo of all of the effects for yourself by clicking here.