building a banner ad?

[mehndi mama]

Anyone got good advice as to how to go about building a banner ad? I have Front Page, which I have a hard time understanding, and Adobe photoshop, and Printmaster Platinum, which I love working with, but does not seem to work with anything practical, and I just got a website through yahoo webhosting, so I've got the Yahoo Sitebuilder.

Can anybody help? (I'm fairly web-stupid, but I can do okay if you explain things s-l-o-w-l-y....HA!)

[Penguintrax]

A banner is nothing more than an animated GIF (format) file.

You can build one in Photoshop,then use ImageReady (should be included with it) to construct the animation.

In Photoshop, build a layered graphic, each layer will become a frame in the animation.

In ImageReady you can import it by layers, and then set transitions between the frames, etc.

If you check ImageReady Help, it has pretty good explanations on created animated GIFs.

There are also many online resources:

http://www.agag.com/

http://www.webreference.com/dev/gifanim/

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Barbara

[Erin Pavlina]

A banner doesn't have to be animated though. It can be static. Make it a gif or a jpg.

Smaller the better. For every 3k of a banner, it takes 1 second to load on slow modems. So the rule of thumb is to try to make your banners under 10k for maximum effectiveness. No point in having a fancy schmancy banner if people have clicked off the page before it loads!