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Banner Creation  Know how

Tips

Freeware

Shareware

Links

     

Banners can be an effective advertising tool. Using words and graphics, a successful banner entices people to click-thru and visit a site. But creating such a banner is not easy for most people. Maybe these tips and links can help.

Beginners should focus on the left column. The right column is reserved for people who are computer savvy and ready to spend hours on creating a banner.  

Instant Banners 
This is the easiest way to create banners. Just type in some text and within seconds, your customized banner is ready. It may even include some flashy animations.

Banner Artists 
These banner artists work for free in exchange for a link from your site. Just tell them what you want on your banner, and they will create it within days.

Do-It-Yourself
Creating a good banner for yourself takes time and effort. The payoff is a unique banner with personality and pride. Why not give it a try?

General Tips - We reveal the secret on how to make a killer banner, and what kills it. This is a must read.

Graphic Tools - You need graphics software to create your banner. See what we recommend.

 

Great Links

Hong Kong Banner Exchange

China Banner Exchange

Asia Banner Exchange

Chinese Banner Exchange

Banner Creation Tips

At first you should become clear to what a banner-ad really is for. "Absolutely easy", some will say. "Banners are for promoting my own homepage, and the folks should come to my sites."

That is almost right, so far. But a banner-ad just has some more functions. With your banner you can - and you even have to - build up recognized image of yourself or your company. It has to invite the surfers, and it has to communicate on its own!

But how to make a banner such like this? How to create a design which "talks" to my potential customers? The effectiveness can be measured with the click-trough-rate (CTR).

e.x.: You got 3 clicks on your banner while it was displayed 100 times. So your CTR is 3%.

1. AIDA

In the banner-advertising this formular is valid, too.
(A)-ttention A banner should not be able to escape someones attention.
(I)-interest It has to attract interest to itself or if possible to your sites.
(D)-esire The reader has to desire viewing your sites.
(A)-ction He has to click your banner.

2. Target group

Before starting in creating your banner, you have to remind your target group. What do you offer and for whom it is ineresting? And: What is interesting to my target group? These are some simple questions with often some simple answers. But you should think of them while working on banner-advertising or making any other promotions.
If I had a site about sports in general, I could not create a banner dealing with soccer only, because only a small part of my target group is interested in soccer.

3. Texts / contents

With your banner you want to launch your whole homepage. Many experiences have already shown that only one ore two items displayed on a banner get much much more ad-clicks, than banners with lots of information. The viewer just recognizes a banner and does not read anything, because it it too busy. So you just have to promote the newest or main aspects of your page. Conceivable contents are e.g. special tips on saving taxes or free software.
 

4. Bright Colors

To get someone's attention, you should use bright and loud colors.
Colors effect the eye differently. Using bright colors can help attract a user's eye, contributing to higher response rates. Research has shown that blue, green and yellow work best, while white, red, and black are less effective.
Another possibility of a color combination is the one you have chosen on your website. So the layout will depend on your homepage and this will sometimes get a higher recognizing effect.

5. Elements

Pay attention on the choice of elements you added into your banner! Do not use too many different ones. It often seems to be overcrowded and will not be mentioned. You can take some graphics from your own homepage which contain to the promoted themes. Remember: Even text-messages without any images can be very nice and effective.  

It has been proved that graphical elements like buttons and forms are not even a bit decorative, but even can raise the click-trough-rate:

 
6. Use Cryptic Messages

What did that ad say? What did that mean?
Cryptic ad banners can help involve a user in the message. Because the "sponsor" of the message is not revealed, cryptic messages can be very intriguing. But there is a downside. Branding is forfeited on the ad. This may not be an issue if branding is not your main objective. Cryptic messages typically increase click-through 18%.

7. Call to Action

Click here ! Enter Here ! Submit Now !
As in traditional direct response, telling consumers what to do helps raise response rates. Simple phrases such as "Click Here", "Visit Now" and "Enter Here" tend to improve response rates by 15%. These phrases should be strategically placed in the ad, preferably on the right side. This is where the eye will be drawn."

8. Animated banners

It is also proved, that animated banners will highly attract the attention. But especially in this case you should remind the large size of animated banners. Many bannerservices limit the file-size to a maximum of 15 kbyte!
On timing each of the inserted images you have to regard the display-times. Every text or image must be able to be realized at least two times! A hint for you: Read the shown textes loudly and clear two times. If the next image is shown earlier, you have to adjust the time-settings. 

In the first part of this side, we will introduce the most famous programms sorted by "freeware" and "shareware". With an added hyperlink You can go straight up to the programmers homepage to download the software.

 
We are searching for more tools, add-on?and programs all the time. Some of the descriptions may be a bit subjective. So we demand on you to give us your experiences and judgements. If you have found some more usefull software in the internet, you are asked to send us a short mail. Please write your comments to AsiaBanner.com  http://asiabanner.com

 
Freeware:
Microsoft GIF Animator
 The Microsoft GIF Animator is a free tool enlarging the Microsoft Image Composer. A bit strange to the rest of Microsofts product-palette it can do a lot and is still easy to handle. The animator displays thumbnails of each picture in the animated gif. It can include existing gif- and avi-files and place them to any position inside the animation. Variable time-settings, ditherings and palettes can be used. Just a simple, but a really usefull tool. [More information and Download]
Ulead Photo Viewer 4.0
 Photo Viewer 4.0 offers a great variety of features. View and convert among 27+ image types, view GIF animations, display multiple images, rotate, zoom, pan, print, or open into PhotoImpact or another image editor. With its intuitive interface and seamless integration with Windows, you'll get a very good graphic-software. [More information]   [Download]
ColorCenter
 ColorCenter is a JavaScript application that let's you quickly and easily try out text and background color combinations, as well as background textures. Choose colors from a palette, or use ColorCenter's color calculator to specify colors in hexadecimal, decimal or percentage form. Built-in links to popular background and graphics libraries let you easily experiment with a wide variety of images. For best results, Netscape Version 3.0 is recommended, and JavaScript is absolutely required! [More information and starting the tool]
Ulead GIF Animation Collection I
 The Ulead GIF Animation Gallery represents only a portion of Ulead's full collection, Ulead GIF Animation Collection I. GIF Animation Collection I includes 450 professionally-developed and well sorted GIF animations. [More information]  [Download]
 

Shareware:
Alchemy Mindworks
GIF Construction Set
$12 		With the GIF Construction Set by Alchemy Mindworks Inc. you can import GIF- and complete AVI-files and seperate the individual images very easy. Building up a new animated GIF in the 89a format is simple and the Construction Set automaticaly dithers all pictures to a global palette, which you can define on your own. If you want to. An included

 Animation Wizzard makes complete animations with selected files in a quick and very simple handling. Transparent backgrounds, loops, comments or even file-positioning are only a few of many features. [More information]
Ulead GIF Animator 1.5
 Ulead GIF Animator makes composing compact GIF animations easy. Although there are missing some wizards, it is one of the most famous and best animation tools. Special effects like splitting, spirals and some others are as well as the very easy operating. To every selected Image you can read time, size, position, colors, titel and opacity. The GIF Animator also provides an color palette controls, powerful and advanced optimization to enable you to quickly produce compact GIF89a animation files. Check out the 30-days-version. [More information]   [Download]
Ulead SmartSaver 2.0
$39,95 		Ulead SmartSaver 2.0 is composed of a GIF SmartSaver, JPEG SmartSaver and an Animation SmartSaver. For still images, GIF and JPEG SmartSaver modules provide side-by-side "before and after" image previews and file size information. Changing settings automatically updates the file size and image previews. GIF and JPEG SmartSaver modules provide far too many features to list here. The modules work with many image editing products that accept 32-bit Photoshop Export plug-ins.
The Animation SmartSaver trims GIF animations down to size. Powerful palette control, color reduction options, difference analysis plus batch processing makes it easy to manage animated GIFs. [More information]   [Download]
Ulead Photo Explorer 4.2
$29,95 		Ulead Photo Explorer is an intuitive tool for browsing images as well as creating HTML thumbnails and slide shows and more. When you work with images, do you ever have trouble connecting the names and the faces? Open any folder with Ulead Photo Explorer and see every image, GIF animation or video file as a visual thumbnail. Even slide shows and resizing GIF animations is no problem. [More information]   [Download]
Ulead Web.Plugins 1.0
$29,95 		Unfortunately even the powerful Adobe Photoshop isn't specifically designed for Web use. That's why Ulead has created Web.Plugins for Photoshop (3.x/4.x and compatible programms like Jasc Paint Shop Pro 4.1+, Micrografx Picture Publisher 6.0+, Corel Photo Paint 6.0+). This set of Effect and Acquire plugins lets you create seamlessly tilable backgrounds, add drop shadows, make 3D buttons and text banners, add frames and generate image map tag coordinates. [More information]   [Download]
Ulead WebRazor for Photoshop
$89 		Ulead WebRazor™ is designed for Photoshop and FrontPage. This suite of seven programs offers effect plugins for creating 3D buttons and effects, background tiles, frames & shadows, image map tags and other impressive web graphics. WebRazor also includes stand-alone utilities Ulead GIF Animator, the Ulead GIF/JPEG and Animation SmartSaver, Photo Explorerand the Photo Viewer. WebRazor ensures wide compatibility with support for over 26 image and video file formats All stand-alone modules can be used by any Windows 95 or NT user. [More information]   [Download]
Ulead COOL 3D 1.0
 COOL 3D is a new 3D titling software that lets you quickly create high impact still and animated 3D titles and headlines for all kind of documents. COOL 3D combines Direct3D productivity with drag-and-drop simplicity to give you awesome results. You just have enter your text, rotate it into place and choose a style, color, texture, camera focus and background options from palettes of visual samples. You can save this 3D-object as a still image, GIF animation, AVI video file or image sequence. [More information]   [Download]
Paint Shop Pro
$69 		Paint Shop Pro, a powerful and easy to use image viewing, editing and conversion programm, supports over 30 image formats. With numerous drawing and painting tools surely one of the best lower-price products. [More information]
Animagic GIF
$19 		The system of Animagic GIF is simple, but effective. You can avoid "Dirty frames" by defining rectangles with the changed part of the animated gif in it. Of course, you can also type in frame-rates per second for each image, but you can even do this for whole groups of images. Aditional windows show information about inserted images, colors, pal-files and so on. [More information]
 

Further Links:
L-View Pro $30 http://world.std.com
Mapedit $25 http://www.boutell.com/mapedit/
Live Image $30 http://www.mediatec.com/#SS1
Web Hotspots $49 http://www.concentric.net/~automata/hotspots.shtml

July 2001

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