Web banner ads is one of the most popular methods of advertising on the internet today thus it has made online advertisement a huge source of revenue for modern businesses. An effective banner design can make the difference between an unsuccessful and successful banner ad campaign. Nowadays almost every website has some form of banner advertising on it.
So here are some most important tips to make your banner effective:
1. Attractive Punch Line: If you want to create the best looking banner advertisement in the world then your punch line must be equally effective. Use something to get the user clicking on your banner and visiting your Web site. Also make sure that you are using a proper combination of colors and fonts.
2. Relevant Content: Always make sure that the content of your banner is relevant to the services/products that you are offering on your site. You will get a lot of clicks and attention of a male internet user by showing a woman in a tiny bikini on your banner but when the user finds out that you are selling something else totally unrelated to a woman in a bikini, e.g. DVDs, he will leave your site without any further ado. Therefore, you will end up getting high clicks but no sales.
3. Include Your Website URL and Logo: It will increase your brand recognition and name even if a banner doesn’t get a single click. However, don't reduce the banner’s punch line or the copy. Use small text to display your website address and try to keep your logo small. It’s better to keep the logo and URL together on either side of the banner.
4. Use Influential Words: Use influential words in your banner design such as "Free," "unbelievable," "incredible," "affordable," etc, since it is proven that usage of such words increases the CTR (click through rate). Users almost always check out stuff that they think is being given away for free. For example, offering a free software demo gets a good response.
5. File Size of Web Banner: While creating web banner ads, remember that the file size of a web banner should be as small as possible, for the simple reason that it will load faster and the visitor will get to absorb it fully before he or she moves on to the next page. The ideal file size of a web banner is 10kb or less. Try minimizing the use of animations and heavy pictures in your banner to reduce the file size.
6. Loading Time: It’s true that most of the internet users spend less than 10 seconds at a specific area of the website. This time is, hence, very important, for in that time your web banner ad needs to grab the viewer’s attention. Thus, a web banner has to display all its content in this time-frame. Make proper use of animation so that the web banner conveys its message within this time frame.
7. Effective Use of Animation: The animated banner is better and generates 30% more CTR than static banner. But the main disadvantage is that the animation results in larger file sizes and takes more time to load the banner. Use animation cleverly; it should attract attention, not annoy people. Keep it simple. Reduce the number of colors and vertical color change to reduce the loading time. Avoid the use of photos in animated gifs and keep animation to a minimum, if photos are employed.
8. Proper Combination of Colors and Fonts: Many studies have indicated that people respond better for bright colors and also that web banner ads containing bright colors have higher CTR than black-and-white banners; hence, use bright colors, such as green, blue, and yellow, or certain color combinations, like a rich yellow on dark blue. Try not to use more than two fonts. Also use a legible font size so that everyone can read the content easily.
10. Design it Professionally: To give a professional look to your banner, you can hire a professional web banner designer to deliver a quality web banner in case you don’t feel capable of doing it yourself. Web banners create a lasting impact about your company image on the visitors. Therefore choose it very carefully. Search on the internet and you will come up with lots of free web banner design advertisements or free banner design softwares.
Layout and Deign of a website are important factors that require proper attention. Good web site design attracts more visitors and more importantly make visitors loyal and fascinated by your website. While designing a website keep these points in your mind to improve the basic design of the website.
1. Research: Do some research before finalizing your website design. Refer some similar sites for layout and design but do not copy them. Example: if you are into Real estate business, it would help to check out some competitors in same business for Real estate website design.
2. Go for unique web design: Unique designs are always appreciated. To make design unique and attractive you can use some images, animation, etc. But avoid excessive use of images and animations because this makes the web page heavy. Aim should be to give a feel and look to the website which is different from any existing similar website.
3. Content is king: Content of your business website should be simple, professional and easy to understand. It should be solely related to your website. Avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes. Use different font style to make content more interesting and distinguish headings from regular text. To make content more understandable use some examples.
4. Colors: Colors create a hypothetical image of your organization in viewer mind. It is better to use colors that express your organization in a positive manner and in a way you want to connect. Do not use very bright colors, unless your website is a Sports / Music Concert website. It makes people physically sick to look at excessively loud colors.
5. Browser Compatibility: Most of the web sites are designed according to Microsoft internet explorer. But these days some other browsers like Netscape, Mozilla Firefox etc. have also become popular. They are a bit different then internet explorer. Certain scripts, flash files and tags may be supported on one browser but not on another. Do ensure that your web site design goes with all these browsers, otherwise user may be put off by visiting your website and never visit back.
6. Music: Use of music on website is a good idea to maintain the interest of viewer. But music enabled sites are ignored by the mostly viewers because music increases the loading time of the web page. Secondly, if music is paying while user if browsing your website, he/ she may easily be put off if it’s say an Elton John instrumental number and the visitor does not like it.
7. Loading Speed: Similar to our practical life, speed also matters on internet. Large numbers of internet users are still using slow dialup connections. And if your website is heavy then surely it will increase the load time and visitor may move on to another website.
8. Avoid Long pages: Don’t write all content on single web page because it will be too lengthy for the viewer to go through it entirely. Nobody has time to read the entire page. Better approach is dividing your content into multiple pages and provide link to these pages on home page and on each page if the links are important.
9. Avoid using Frames: Frames are not supported by some web browsers. Neither are they, search engine friendly. Its better to keep them off your website. Try to use minimum frames on your webpage.
10. Simplicity is the best policy: Keep your website design simple in order to attract more viewers. Nobody likes complicated things. Create clear navigations so that viewer can easily go through your website.
Don’t Use Pop-Ups: Although pop ups are used for advertisement, nobody likes them. They not only waste time and space but also divert the users’ attention from your website. Users usually block these pop-ups by using a pop-up blocker.
Don’t Use Website Creation Software: There is a plethora of softwares available in the market, which make the web designing process an easy and less time-consuming one. These softwares provide some pre-designed templates, where you only need to enter your text and have your own website ready and running in a couple of hours. However, the drawback in this approach of web site development is that you will never get a unique design; and in the corporate sector, uniqueness is a thing that singles you out.
Home Page: Your home page is the most visited page in your entire website. Don’t make your home page heavy with graphics files, movies, pictures, flash or with sound. Since you have only 5 to 10 seconds to capture the visitor’s attention, using such heavy graphics on your homepage will only succeed in diverting the visitor’s attention.
Proper Links: Don’t drive your visitors to a competitor’s website. These days almost every website has a link or a “resources” page. No doubt it is a good idea to earn some extra money. However, it is recommended not to include any links of your direct competitors. Giving your traffic to a competitor might prove harmful to your business.
Colors and Background: Avoid using loud colors or a background wallpaper in your website design, if you are not a professional designer. All browsers don’t display these things in a similar way. Something that looks amazing on your screen may look humdrum on a visitor’s screen.
About Page: Don’t put any personal information on your home page. If you really want to do this, include an “About Us” page in your site. Here you can specify the sort of experience and qualification that pays out in the long run in your business, although don’t make it sound like your resume.
Unique Content: Strictly avoid plagiarism. All information is protected by copyright laws and you would be taken to court for copying your content from other sites. Moreover, this will also decrease the search engine visibility. Maintain the uniqueness of your content. It is good idea to take the help of some Website Design Services for this purpose.
Text and Fonts: Never use text size which is too small or too large for your website content. Check your pages on different resolutions for, this will be helpful in deciding the text size. Use fonts that improve the readability of the content and create an impact on the reader.
Poor Use of Fonts: Sometimes web designers use too small or too large font sizes, due to which, reading a webpage becomes very hard. Using multiple font types also makes it difficult to read a webpage. The better way to emphasize a particular word is by highlighting it using colors, or by making it bold or italic. Refrain from underlining it since reading underlined text is harder compared to normal text. Also due to underlined text, differentiating between links and underlined text becomes difficult for the visitor, since usually both look normally the same.
Negligible Links: Make the links underlined or use colored text, if you are using links within your webpage. In this way, differentiating between links and text becomes easy for visitors. To highlight or link text or lines, use keywords instead of making the entire line linkable. That is, instead of devising an entire sentence as a link, make a particular phrase linkable. Eg, “Website Development Services”. However, keep in mind that the keywords should make sense and are not meaning less. It must also flow well and in keeping with the context of the rest of the text.
Excess Use of Animation: By using animation, you can make the webpage more appealing and attractive. However, just as too much of a good thing should be avoided, so should an excess use of animation; for, in that case the webpage becomes heavy and take more time to load than the normal. Many designers use moving pictures and text on the webpage for website design, which ends up diverting the attention of the user and hence should be strictly avoided.
Writing Content: Your website content defines the purpose of your website and hence is the key to its success. Thus try to make the content as meaningful, understandable and short as possible. Grammatical and spelling mistakes are quite common amongst writers; hence, try to avoid such mistakes for they present a bad image of the website and reflect on the minimal effort that had been put for the same. The content and its flow should be such as to clarify all the queries of a visitor.
Incompatibility: A couple of years ago, Microsoft internet explorer was the first choice of internet users and still is for a lot of internet users all around the world. However, the situation now has changed to some extent with the advent of a plethora of other browsers available in the market such as Firefox, Netscape etc. hence, your website should be designed to be compatible to all other browsers as well.
Large Forms: One of the most common problems that visitors face is the length of forms that visitors need to fill up for different processes like registering on a website, online trading, e-commerce, etc. Most of these forms contain unwanted fields and options like “first name, middle name, last name”, when it’s perfectly feasible to ask for the same in one option as “Full Name”. Hence, use fields and options which are necessary and get rid of the unnecessary ones.
Remember Price: Nowadays it’s possible to buy almost everything online from shopping sites or ecommerce websites. Most of these sites, however, do not include the product prices in their product lists, leading to unnecessary hassles on the part of the user who needs to access extra pages in search of product prices. Hence, including the product prices in the product list is strongly recommended since it allows the user to categorize different items, compare them on the basis of their prices and select the one most relevant to him or her.
Using Scrolling: Certain websites use horizontal scrolling, which putting two and two together, is a pretty bad idea since it leads to excessive to and fro horizontal scrolling just to finish, say, one single paragraph. Compared to it, Vertical scrolling is quite acceptable since it doesn’t lead to any unnecessary or excessive scrolling. Hence, try to avoid horizontal scrolling as much as you can in your website design.
Use of Pop-Ups: Using pop-ups is one of the worst ways of advertisement. They are singularly annoying and undesirable, since they break the users’ concentration and prove a barrier to their regular workflow.
Outdated information: Outdated info on your website will push it into oblivion. Hence, the designer needs to regularly update the information on the webpage.
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