Planning to advertise with a IAB compliant publisher (Yahoo!, Inc.,ESP.com, ABC news, Advertising.com, AFL, MAN, USAToday.com and many more)?

We are now offering the Universal Ad Package – which consists of:

• A 300 x 250 IMU – (Medium Rectangle) banner
• A 180 x 150 IMU – (Rectangle) banner
• A 160 x 600 IMU – (Wide Skyscraper) banner
• A 728 x 90 IMU – (Leaderboard) banner
• (size substitutions are allowed)

All for $130. We can usually offer less than 48 hour turnaround on these orders.

Use our contact form to send us your order or request information on this banner pack.

If you are not familiar with IAB (http://www.iab.net) you can find more information and guidelines below.

Making your own banner is like painting your own sign for your business. Some people, of course, can do that effectively (sign painters for example) but most can’t. Your banner (and more importantly, your website) directly reflects your business. For those with minimal design skills specific to making banners, a high quality, professionally designed banner is more than worth the small investment. It gives people a good first impression of your business and your products and services and motivates them to visit your website to learn more. It is an essential element in converting your advertising budget to sales. Well made, well placed banners work and chances are that you have clicked on some of them yourself. With that in mind, think of all the bad banners that you have ignored. Each banner you have ignored represents someone’s wasted advertising budget. There is no place for DIY or amateur, inexperienced designers in the very competitive internet banner advertising arena.

Successful business depends on making the right decisions. We all know that. Unless you have plans to become a banner designer, the “make your own ad banner” decision is a no-brainer. You can spend a great deal of time learning and perfecting ad banner specific design and direct response techniques and try to do it yourself, you can throw your money away (both the cost of the banner and your ad campaign budget) hiring an amateur – or you can spend $45.00 and get a great, effective, professionally made banner in about 24 hours. Your time is valuable and it pays not to waste it.

Effective Budget-Friendly Banner Advertising
Part One – An Introduction

“Banners suck.”
“Banners are great.”

Bi-polar opinions on banners. Everybody has an opinion. That’s dandy. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s just agree that banners are often a fact of life for online businesses. Maybe you have one banner or maybe you have a thousand banners. How many you have does not really matter. What matters is using what you’ve got in the most effective way possible. You want people to see your banner, click on your banner, and then be taken to your clean, usable, attractive, informative (it better be) website and purchase your product or service.

Job done.
Easy.
Bob’s your uncle.

Why then, if it is so easy, do people come up with so many dumbass ways of trying to accomplish this simple process? Maybe they tend to forget that it is a PROCESS and every step is critical if you want it to work.

Here’s a few examples of how to bork the process:

Continue Reading »

Our featured website templates highlight some of the more outstanding templates in our commercial template collection.

These templates provide you with a quick, simple way to give your website the solid, robust, reliable look and feel that you want to show your customers without the need for expensive custom web design work. If you believe that time is money, our website design templates can save you a lot of both.

Click on the featured templates to veiw full details or view our full selection of commercial templates here.

1. Think carefully about where you will place your banner. The more targeted, the better.
2. Don’t use hype or make unrealistic promises. Provide solid information.
3. Have your banner designed professionally if you want a professional look.
4. Don’t use any silly tricks to misdirect the viewer.
5. Well designed, useful animation attracts people. Cheap tricks annoy people.
6. Don’t try to say too much on a banner. Text bloat kills effectiveness.
7. Banner ads are not print ads. What works for one may not work for the other.
8. Try to come up with an interesting hook for your banner text that people will notice.
9. Use your company name, logo, URL etc. on banners. Branding helps people remember.
10. Keep the style clean. A clean look gives the best first impression. Clean design takes more skill than bloated design.
11. Flash is good for many things. Banners are not one of those things.
12. Factor in the cost of your ad campaign when you decide to have your banners designed by an amateur. That way you will have an accurate idea of exactly how much money you threw away.

I recently got a banner order that made me jump for joy. Really. I jumped.
I’ve never done that before because of an order. It was pretty fun.

It was these words that got me going:

“Don’t put a call to action (click here) on it. I don’t care too much if people click it. I just want people to SEE it!”

Could it be? Someone was thinking about BRANDING? Actually understood it. Was she aware enough of modern web marketing realities to actually enter in to that world ruled by international corporations and try to get people to remember her company?

She more than understood all this. She also understood that she was hell bent on turning her small business INTO one of those international corporations.

I love it.

Close your eyes and think of a company.

There is a good chance that whatever picture comes to mind is the result of branding. That you even thought of that company in the first place indicates they are on the right track in terms of advertising, but what you see comes from branding.

Those colors, logos, products or whatever you see are there (more often than not) due to somebody, somewhere thinking about branding. Of course, other things come into play with those mental snapshots – but even if all you see is a massive credit card bill, that bill might have also been the result of branding. Branding that worked.

The point here is that people are more open to your advertising efforts if they know who you are or at least can make some sort of mental association. If your banner is effective and leaves a good first impression, even if they only glanced at it for less than a second, people are likely to be more receptive the next time they come across one of your ads. They have seen you before and up comes the mental snapshot saying “I know these guys.” Even if they just see your company name in print or a text ad or a link -they are still likely to associate your logo, colors and other parts of your branding with it.

So don’t lock yourself into the click-through-rate = effectiveness box. There is other work your banner can do for you besides directly generating sales. It can help make that association with your market that can lead to future sales and lay the groundwork for more effective ad campaigns of all kinds.

http://browsershots.org/

What does your website look like in Dillo 0.8, MSIE 7.0, Phoenix 0.1, Firefox 2.0, Iceweasel 2.0? SeaMonkey 1.1 (and many more) web browsers?

You could install all of them on several computers runing Linux, Windows and Mac, or you could hop on over to browsershots.org and get free screenshots of what your site looks like in about 40 different browsers. Nothing beats free shots!

Since this blog is new I’m doing this as I write to see what needs fixing…

http://browsershots.org/website/http://www.animatedbanner.com/aninews/

So far:

Safari 2.0 on Mac OS X looks okay.
Firefox 2.0.0.1 on Mac OS X looks okay.

14 minutes in now…

Yawn… but all good things come in time. Submitted 26 minutes ago, to expire in 4 hours.

Firefox 2.0 on Linux lookin’ right.
Konqueror 3.5.5 on Linux… no problems.
Iceweasel 2.0.0.1 on Linux … oh yeah.
Firefox 2.0 on Windows … same as the others

Well you get the idea. It’s not all about you SpongeBob – it’s all about your vistors. You want all of them to see pretty much the same thing when they visit your website.

So do them a favor, and do some shots at browsershots and fix what needs fixing.