How To Design the Perfect Banner in Core Draw
Five Quick Tips for Creating the Perfect Banner
Take a look at nearly any website, and
what’s the first thing you see? A large, colorful banner right across
the top. The header banner of a website is probably the most important
part of the site: it gives visitors their first impression and gives you
a chance to showcase a product or tell them what your company is all
about. Ad banners on other websites direct traffic to your site and
catch the attention of potential customers, and ad banners on your own
site can showcase products or promotions and make it fast and easy for
people to find what they are looking for.
Banners
are your chance to impress people and make them want to like your company – or to turn them away in boredom before you ever get a chance.
Here are five quick tips to make sure your banners are helping and not
hurting.
Choose a Goal
What
is the banner for, and who do you want to see it? Just like in any other forms of marketing, understanding your audience and your intentions is the most important step in designing a banner.
If you’re running a funeral parlor, you probably don’t want a neon
banner with flashing lights. Is your banner meant to represent your
business as a whole? Then don’t talk about specific products. Is your
banner meant to sell one product or let customers know about a sale?
Then keep it simple: make sure every part of your banner works towards
getting people to click the link for that product. Anything in your
banner that doesn’t further its single, clear goal should be removed.
Use Color Contrast
There’s no point to a banner if people don’t even see it’s there – make
sure the colors of the banner stand out against the background either of
your site or of the sites the ad is sitting on. Here’s a tip when
designing ads for advertising services like Google Adsense: most website
backgrounds are white or gray, so banners in blues, greens, and earth
tones will pop without clashing. On your own site, you have the luxury
of being able to choose the perfect colors for your website’s design.
One easy way to make your banner stand out is to reverse your color
scheme – if your website is mostly gray with blue highlights, try a
banner that’s mostly blue with gray highlights and add a splash of a bright color to draw the eye.
Link Where You Want to Send Visitors
This
may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many web banners don’t make
use of the best part of the internet: links. When people see a banner,
they expect to be able to click on it for more information – and of
course you want them to! As a rule of thumb, a header banner or an ad
banner on another website should link back to your site’s home page, and
an ad banner for a specific product or service should link to the
purchase page for that product. This banner from www.corel.com
takes visitors to the product page for the featured product, rather
than linking them directly to a cart or buy page. Since the banner sits
right on the home page, the traffic there is most likely to be people
who want more information, rather than people who have already made up
their minds to buy one specific thing.
Keep Text to a Minimum
Nothing
drives people away faster than having to wade through a wall of words
to figure out what your banner is trying to convey. Don’t worry! There’s
plenty of space to tell them all about your product or company after
they’re on the right page. Your banner should have as few words as
possible – let the picture do the talking. Take a look at this banner on
www.microsoft.com:
Hire a Designer to Get You Started
Unless
you’re a digital artist, you probably won’t have experience making this
type of image yourself. Luckily, you don’t have to do it all on your
own! Hiring a good designer for your banners is probably the single most
efficient way to spend your web budget. A designer can work with you to
find the perfect combination of image and text to represent what you
are all about. Once you have an image you’re happy with, you can use and
reuse it in all kinds of banner designs that you can modify yourself if
you need to.
Steps to Making a Banner
- Decide where the banner belongs – is this going on the home page of your site, or is it a banner you’ll submit to an advertising service to go on other sites and drive traffic to yours?
- Know your audience – Who is the banner meant for? Are you targeting new customers, or telling existing ones about a promotion?
- Hire a designer. If you’re planning to hire a designer, do so early in the process. Know what you want out of it so they can help as much as possible.
- Pick a theme. Every banner needs an image, and you need to find the right image for the job. Try to have your theme be something that will appeal to your target audience.
- Pick a primary design color.
- Make the image. This is the part where you and the designer get to have fun.
- Add text – keep it simple!
- Put the banner on your page, or submit it to the advertising service. Link to the target page. You’re done!
Comments
Post a Comment