A.P. Lawrence

How can I make a Banner Ad?

I had meant to publish this when I put up Your Banner Ads, but I got distracted and forgot.

You can use any paint or graphics program to create banner ads. Depending upon where you are going to use them, you may need to stick to certain size guidelines. For example, if used here, I prefer that the banner be no more than 468 x 60. You probably do NOT want to use high resolution color, because you want your banner to load quickly - a banner that loads slowly may never be seen or may annoy your potential customer.

Your graphics program may be able to create animated banners. For example, I created this with The Gimp (see this link for how and why it is "off center"):

You can also find plenty of folks who will create ad banners from text you supply. These can be free (part of the banner advertises something they are selling): google for "free banners". Here's an (awful) example:

There are also places that will create custom banners for you at reasonable cost. http://www.needbanner.com is one.

Finally, you can create a "banner ad" that's just text. Google has shown that these ads can be very succesful. All you need for that is basic html skills. For example, here's a simple text banner:

That's very simple html:

<p><table border=1 rules=none  style="margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;" width="35%">
<tr><td align=center>Your Banner Ad Is Text</td>
<tr><td align=center><br></td>
<tr><td align=center>But So What?</td>
</table>
<p>

You could get much, much fancier.

A banner isn't much good without a link, of course, so you'd put an <a href= in there, or around the whole thing. Generally if you were supplying this to someone else to run, you'd just tell them what you want it pointed at.

It's a good idea to point the ad at some page on your site that you can track, or to include extra information in the link that you can extract from your browser logs. This lets you judge the response to your ad. For example, when I run ads on Google AdWords, I add "?referrer=google" to the reference link. So, a link to this page might look like this:

<a
href="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/createbannerad.html?referrer=google">How
do I make a Banner Ad?</a>

The extra "?referrer=google" doesn't affect anything, but will show up in my logs, allowing me to easily track how useful the ad is.

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