Do you own a site that we link to?
We want to help users find your great free projects
The success of Make for Christmas is completely reliant on our users visiting your site and we do all that we can to supply information about your web pages that will encourage people to click through to your pages.
We enjoy hundreds of thousands of page views every month on our sites and we are aggressively chasing new users with the relaunch of this site. A visitor to Make for Christmas is a potential visitor to your site.
Linking to Your Pages
We only ever link directly to free projects and by default pages that we link to open in the same browser window or tab as we believe most users prefer this.
We try to avoid linking to pages that then forward users to your site, so that users are sent directly to your pages.
We only collect links to projects rather than sites so that users of Make for Christmas can easily search for just the right project. This can cause a slight issue with projects offered as PDFs if there is not an HTML page on your site that serves specifically as an introduction to the project. In this case we may link directly to the PDF, but we always try to ensure that the url of your website is included in our title text so that users know where the project has come from. If we are linking directly to a PDF and you believe that there is a better page that we should be linking to, please do let us know.
We are trying to build a comprehensive list to the best written and presented projects on the web and if we link to your pages, it is because we feel that your site is a great resource for the users of Make for Christmas. However, should you prefer that we don't link to one or more of your webpages, please do let us know. We will need to confirm that you are the site owner and once that is done, we'll remove any of your pages from our directory in line with your request.
The Use of Your Project Previews
Since the relaunch of Make for Christmas in 2011, we have started to display preview images of projects that we link to. This is a feature that has been requested and research suggests that images encourage users to click through to your pages.
We understand that this does lead to some questions from web site owners and we have tried to put in place policies and options that will be acceptable to web site owners. If an image preview owned by you is featured on Make for Christmas, we would ask that you read the following few paragraphs.
- Do we have the right to display your previews on Make for Christmas?
We delayed showing images on Make for Christmas until we were confident that our usage of images would be classed as fair use. We display preview images to help users find suitable projects, but users must click through to your site to view the details of your project.
However our policy is to respect the wishes of copyright owners and if you would prefer that we didn't display an image with the link to your site, just let us know and we'll comply with your wishes. Please note that we will need to confirm that you are the site owner.
If you're concerned about the use of your bandwidth when your sites are displayed, please read the following note. - Are we using your bandwidth to display your previews?
The short answer is yes, but we want to do all we can to ensure that this is not a problem for you and your site. While we are happy that displaying images via inline linking constitutes fair use, we cannot be so confident about hosting images without the express permission of the owner.
If you would like an image to be displayed next to links to your web site, but do not want your bandwidth used, we will be delighted to host copies of your images on our server and display these copies on Make for Christmas. This means that your bandwidth will only ever be used if someone clicks to visit your site. Please get in touch if you'd like us to host your images and as soon as we have confirmed that you are the site owner, we'll make the change.
If you're not too worried about bandwidth, perhaps because your hosting offers an unlimited service, we would still like you to know that Make for Christmas uses Lazy Loading techniques for the directory preview images. In simple terms, this means that a preview image is only ever loaded into the page if a user scrolls down the page to that link. For example, if we had a link to your site near the bottom of a page and the user only scrolled down the page for the first handful of links, your image would never be loaded. This step helps to minimize the usage of your bandwidth.
Unanswered Questions?
If you own a site that we link to and you have a query or question not covered here, please don't hesitate to get in touch. We always want to do all we can to work with site owners to make it easy for anyone to find the best free projects on the web.
