Banners are effective media materials that can make or break a company's ad campaign. For web sites, along with corporate logo, banner speaks of your message and what you want to achieve for your corporate image and identity.To help you with your banner design, we have compiled following tips and suggestions that have made other web sites effective in terms of amount of visitors and sales.
The Do's of Designing Your Banner
DO use animation. Especially animation that is quick to download. Animations do attract attention of your target audience, but it should not take much time to download or else your visitors would just click on to another site.
But remember to provide animation in minimum. Too much would not attract but irritate your visitors. It will also overwhelm your page.
Grantastic Designs have provided following general guidelines for animated banners: •The animation should be subtle enough to attract attention but should not be so ostentatious as to interfere or clash with design of web page you are advertising on. •An animation that loops endlessly tends to irritate visitors. Have animation loop 7-10 times, leaving main message on last animation frame. •Conversely, some visitors will stop a web page from loading before banner animation has loaded, leaving only first frame. Thus, it might be a good idea to have your message come across in your first frame if you know that web page you are advertising on has a long download time.
DO provide features that call for some action. Images that ask visitors to "click" or "submit" on your banner can improve significantly rate of visitors clicking on your web page. Visitors are attracted to click on icons especially if you offer them something in return.
DO provide "FREE" in your banner. Human nature provides for attraction of anything that is offered "FREE". Depending on what is being offered, word "FREE" can increase rate of visitors clicking on your web site. Web sites usually offer free demonstrations of new software. This often gets good response from target audience. Offering free money though produces suspicion among browsers since people tend to question what catch is.