Create Web Banner Ads with Banner Templates

Online banners on websites and blogs are commonly used for advertising special features or products. They are quite effective in catching the attention of viewers. Rather than designing from scratch, banner templates can be used to create attractive and effective banners in a variety of standard sizes.

Banner templates are blueprints or readymade designs using which you can quickly create professional-looking banners. As all the aspects of design are already taken care of in these templates, all you need to do is to add your unique content to them and hey, presto, your banner is ready for use!

Lets take a whirlwind tour of the world of online banners and banner templates.

Use of the Online Banner

As we surf the Internet, we constantly come across numerous ad banners. They are placed in a variety of areas in a website or may come in a popup window. Wherever a banner is placed, it is usually hard to miss, especially if it has images and animation.

The websites of well-respected publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post have banner ads for subscription offers and news alerts for specific sections such as Economy and Business.

The popular email service provider Yahoo uses a banner on its website to exhort readers to visit their sports section.

Most websites host online banner ads of products and services advertised by various companies. Google AdSense provides a constant source of online banner ads to website owners and blog publishers who sign up for the service. This helps website and blog publishers to earn revenue from such banner ads.

These examples show the dominance of the online banner as an advertising tool on the Internet. Professionally-designed banner ad templates can help in the creation of effective online banners for advertising your products and features.

Create Online Banners with Banner Templates

You may be launching a new online product and in need of advertising the launch. Or you may be the owner of content-rich website ready to announce a whole new section in your website.

In both cases, you would need an online banner for advertising the product or feature.

What if you dont know how to make a banner using imaging software? Or if the case is that you need to make online banner ads quickly and lack the time to design one from scratch. .

In such cases, banner templates can come to your rescue. These templates are readymade designs for various types and sizes of online banners. They can consist of text, images and animation.

All you have to do to create your own unique online banners easily is to download banner design templates from reputed Internet resources and customise them for your websites.

Benefits of Using Web Banner Templates

Heres a summary of the benefits of using web banner templates to make online banners:

• Speed - Making online banners using banner templates can drastically cut down the time you need to start your advertising campaign online.
• Ease of Use Most templates are easy to customise. You just have to replace the generic data in the source file with your own text. Providers of web banner templates such as buytemplates.net also offer to customization services.
• Multiple Banner Sizes Many banner design templates available over the Internet cover all the standard banner sizes. You just have to choose which size specification best fits your needs.
• Professional Design All the elements in a banner including text and images need to come together cohesively. A professionally-designed template can help create banners with the right visual balance between various elements in the design. The placement of text and images would also be designed to have maximum impact for viewers.

Standard Sizes of Banner Ad Templates

Online banners generally follow prescribed size specifications. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a US-based organisation of media companies which has set voluntary guidelines for online banner size standards. Banner ad templates available online usually follow the standards set the IAB.

Size specifications for online banners and banner ad templates are expressed in pixels. For example, a banner of the size 728 x 90 would mean that it is 728 pixels wide and 90 pixels high or tall.

Some of the standard size specifications in which banner templates are available are:

• Leaderboard, 728 x 90 This is a wide rectangular online banner usually placed at the top, bottom or middle of a webpage. The banner would span the width of a website.
• Banner, 468 x 60 This type of banner has less width than a leaderboard and has more flexible placement options in a website.
• Medium Rectangle, 300 x 250 As the dimensions indicate, this type of banner has balanced proportions almost resembling a square. It can be placed with ease in any area of a website.
• Wide Skyscraper, 160 x 600 This is a tall banner. It can be placed on either side of a webpage.

Working with Content in Banner Templates

According to the content, templates for banners can be categorised into the following types:

• Plain Text These templates contain only text content which needs to be customised.
• Image and Text These templates can include images as well as text. When using a template, you can choose to keep the image or substitute it with your own. Template providers may also provide exclusive use of images. These banner files can be in image file formats such as GIF, JPEG or PNG.
• Flash Banner Templates - Flash is a software program used to create animations for the web. When using Flash banner templates, customisation can be done only using the Adobe Flash software program. Flash template files which can be edited have the extension .FLA. The resultant Flash movie object created as a banner has the .SWF extension.

There are many websites that offer banner templates and online banner creators. Buytemplates.net provides online templates for banners of all standard sizes and formats. The site has a huge variety, making it easy for you to choose the best-fit template for your needs.

Buytemplates.net templates for banners are available in PSD (Photoshop), HTML and FLA (Flash) formats. You can download templates for banners from the site and then customise them with your content. Alternatively, you can opt for customisation services.

Go through the wide selection of banner templates at buytemplates.net and create effective online banners.