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.