Banner Design

Banner advertising is by far the most popular and widespread form of advertising on the Internet, almost every website has some form of banner advertising on it. There's just no escaping the banner on the net.

There are five basic ingredients that are considered the most important, using all or most of them will always enable you to get a higher click through rate for your various banners. Here is the list for banner design tips.

Small size helps

This is one of the most important things you've to get right when designing a banner, if the .GIF or .JPG file is large it will take a few seconds to download and by then the visitor might have scrolled down the page meaning he or she doesn't even get to see your banner. If people don't see your banner they definitely aren't going to click on it. Therefore make sure your file stays below 10K, 15K at the absolute most, it's sometimes hard to do but if the others can do it, we can do it too.

Make them click

This is one of the easiest ways to increase the CTR (click through rate) of a banner, on this all the experts agree. Using a call to action simply involves having the words 'click here' or some other words such as 'sign up now' or something similar which urges to viewer to do something.

Make it flashy but NOT too much

Banners with moving elements attract the eye a lot more than static banners do. The whole idea of designing banners is to grab the attention of website visitors, using small animation helps to do this. I say small because I don't want you to go overboard and fill a banner with lots of animation as this is a bad idea because one it increases file size and two it's generally annoying to people after a while especially when they're trying to read an article or tutorial. If your banner annoys them they'll most likely just leave without clicking on it.

Tell about Product/Service

This one is kind of a given but you should always include good ad copy in your banner, lots of fancy animation and pictures won't entice them to click, elements such as these only look after grabbing the attention of the visitors. It's the actual text that will get people wanting to check out your product. Try to emphasis the benefits not features of your product or service. Tell people how your product will make their life easier. Keep your wording short and concise, if you can use words that have been proven to attract people such as 'free', 'proven' and 'secret' do.

Faking is Good

Many of the very successful banner ads of late have incorporated some kind of fake elements in them. There are various fake elements banner designers can use such as fake scroll bars, fake text links, fake selection boxes, fake text boxes and fake submit buttons to mention just a few. Banners with fake elements perform so well because people think they're clicking on a link to go to another page on the current site or they think they're clicking on a button but in fact they're actually clicking on a banner with a picture of a button and text link.

Always always place your banner on sites that cater for your target audience (ie - the people most likely to buy your product). There's no point putting a banner for a new golf club you sell on a site dedicated to software, visitors to the site simply aren't going to be interested and you're just wasting your money. You should be aiming to place the golf banner on golf related websites, this way you're much more likely to make money. If you're not exposing your banner to your target audience none of the above tips and tricks can save you.

So feel free to contact me, if you need logo designed for your company.