Do you use a flash banner template? Do you even know what a banner template is? You should always use a banner template for your sites whether it’s .gif banners, .jpg banners or flash banners. A banner template will ensure that all of your banners match, even if they are about different products.
What is a template? It’s a design tool that lets you create the exact same thing, easily, over and over again. Using banner templates can save you a ton of time and effort as after you create the flash banner template all you should have to do is fill in a few of the blank spots and your flash banner or regular banner should be ready to go.
That’s a pretty simplified explanation but it gives you the basic idea. It’s always a great idea to create a template for things that you have to do over and over or for things that are very similar.
Some of the things that may be similar are the colors on a website and you would want to use those colors in the banner template where appropriate. You might also create another template for the same site with contrasting colors to use as a template.
After you have your flash banner template colors you will want to have the fonts you use be the same as the fonts on your site. Say what, fonts in a flash banner? Aren’t flash banners just little movies that play in a banner space. Sure they are but you might also be using some fonts to hilite specific words or phrases in the flash advertising banner.
Most of the ads you see from the big companies are just mini movies or tv commercials redone for a website. Tons of them use flash because almost every computer and lots of cell phones have flash capability.
There is at least 1 con to flash banners and you can’t do to much about it. File size is the biggest problem. There are things you can do to minimize the problem but it will always exist. The one thing you can do in your flash templates is try to minimize the file size. People with slow connections just don’t have the speed for the huge flash banners to work very well.
Using some design tools will make your website better and flash banner templates are just one of the tools you can use when you make your website banners.