What is a Website Banner and How to Design It

Learn how to design an effective website banner with tips & examples from Creatopy! Understand what makes an effective website banner & how it affects your business.

What is a Website Banner and How to Design It

An identification page printed at the beginning of a print job by many print operators is known as a banner of the page. It serves as a title page and separator between print jobs. Your website banner is the main image that ranks first in billing on your homepage. In web language, it can also be referred to as a hero image or billboard. A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web provided by an ad server.

This type of online advertising involves embedding an ad on a web page with the intention of driving traffic to a website through a link to the advertiser's website. In many cases, banners are delivered through a central ad server. This retrieval system is often how the content provider can pay for Internet access to supply the content in the first place. However, advertisers typically use ad networks to serve their ads, resulting in a profit-sharing system and higher quality of service. The concept of advertising banners was first introduced by Time Warner's Pathfinder (website), which was launched on October 24, 1994, the same week as HotWired, but three days earlier.Walter Isaacson, then president of Time Inc.

New Media and Columbia Journalism Review give credit to Bruce Judson, then CEO of Time Inc. New media, for the invention of the concept of advertising banner. In an interview with Harvard's Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, on the history of the Internet, Isaacson spoke of Judson's contribution, saying, “It really transformed everything.” Immediately, Madison Avenue decided: 'Oh, my God, we have to understand this. We have to hire a lot of young people.'A banner image (also called a “hero image”) is the big picture you see when you open a website design.

It's usually at the top, but its placement may vary as recent design trends change and designers try to make their websites look more unique. In this blog, I'll talk about how to choose the right banner for your site. In addition to determining the shape of your web banner, you'll need to consider the size of your web banner. In other words, what are the dimensions? Some web banners are small and some are absolutely huge. The size of the web banner will often depend on where you place it and who asks you to design it. A website may have size restrictions that need to be considered.

The best ads are usually created by experts who design high-quality web banners that are eye-catching and lead to a higher return on ad spend. Designing a web banner can be difficult, so it's worth looking at web banner examples for ideas and inspiration. Of course, there is much more to web banner design than these big and general concepts that need to be considered. For years, Creatopy has been preaching and continues to teach and provide examples on how to effectively use advertising banners. Your website banner should also take into account your business objective which will be reflected in the CTA (Call To Action).

Therefore, it is important to create a banner image aware of how it will affect the overall impression of your website, your brand and your business. Facebook banners are image-based ads in the right column of user feeds while Audience Network ads are displayed on third-party sites at the top or bottom of the screen usually above or below the header or footer. Another thing to keep in mind regarding the web banner you're designing is whether that web banner is static or animated. Animated web banners are those that are like mini-movies or stories and can even have interactive elements as part of the animation. This blog has always been a source of education, inspiration and examples when it comes to talking about the strategies used by different companies and industries when creating successful advertising banners. The Google Display Network is one of the largest and oldest display networks and is currently leading in terms of advertising platforms for web banner ads. But if you are a company that offers a bunch of different products or services, you may want to use a smaller billboard so that you can display a section under the banner that lists some of them.

Faith Fanner
Faith Fanner

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