2)      Don’t Annoy – Today’s online shopper is more persnickety than ever before, and the last thing they want is to be annoyed with cheap ploys, animated objects, flashy words, and other old techniques which are no longer innovative. Instead, discover new modern way to capture attention while still respecting the internet viewers’ space.

3)      Get to the Point – Words do not come cheaply when it comes to space on a banner ad. Designers will have to ensure they are stating the mission and goal of the ad – the attention grabber and call to action – with as few of words as possible. This will help be sure readers see the whole message, as well as leave white space for attractiveness.

4)     Scalability – Designers must be sure their ad will still look good no matter the size of the screen it is being viewed on. Today’s online consumer surfs the web on screen as large as a television and as small as phone. Make sure the ad’s graphics, type, and colors all look high quality no matter the scale.

5)     Creativity – Designers must not let the limited space and restrictions of banner ad design get in the way of their creativity. Still take the time to brainstorm and create something impressive. 

SkyScraper – Skyscraper ads are available in standard and wide sizes. These advertisements run vertical along the edge of a website page – left of right. The benefit of these is that online viewers will most likely view the entire advertisement while they are reading the text on the site page.

Leatherboard – A Leatherboard looks like an oversized full banner ad (the traditional banner advertisement everyone is familiar with). This larger ad expands the horizontal canvas giving designers more space to be creative. However, these ads will most likely also be more expensive.

Square Button – Square buttons are small squares which are typically featured along the right hand side of a website. Squares have the advantage of giving an even design space for the web artist. Sometimes this can be simpler than working with long and skinny spaces. However, square buttons are small and will typically be featured alongside other advertisements which means competition for your ad.

Half Banner – If you are attracted to the traditional banner ad, but looking for a less expensive alternative, consider a half banner. The small space means more affordable but you will get similar dimensions and placement.

Designpax – Online Web design on demand has the unique ability to help customers feel more secure when making a purchase online by designing the checkout process to be comprehensive, intuitive, and secure in appearance. While the tech department will be responsible for much of the actual internal security elements, designers are responsible for relaying this message to the customers. Here are some tips for creating a checkout process that

• Keep the Shopping Cart Clutter Free: It can be tempting for marketers to use the shopping cart as an up-sell space. Similar to the checkout line at the grocery store, designers will most likely be asked to make plenty of space in the shopping cart where extra products can be suggested for customers to purchase. While this is a powerful marketing tool, it can also backfire by making customers feel nervous that the business is too pushy or new products are in their cart which they didn’t request. If designers are required to use this sales tactic, keep the suggested products far from the actual products the person is buying.
• Show a Timeline: Customers always want to know exactly when their credit card is going to be charged. Make sure there is a timeline which shows customers where they are in the checkout process such as “reviewing purchase” or “finished”. While it may seem like enough to have the timeline at the top of the page, it is a good idea to add copy at the bottom of the “next” button which indicates what the upcoming step will be once the customer moves on.
• Always Display the Total Price: Be sure the total price (shipping included, or show “pending” if the cost of shipping hasn’t been determined yet) is showing at all times in a margin or on each page during the checkout process. This will help customers feel like they aren’t going to be charged for something additional by surprise.
• Use Custom Icons: Icons are small images which helps customers understand how to navigate a website. These include images of arrows, small shopping carts, and the “click here” hand. Icons combined with good copy are an effective way to help customers always know exactly where to go next during checkout.

1. Navigation – Navigation is one of the trickiest parts of good web design. This is probably true because web designers are so familiar with the website they are creating, they forget that everyone else won’t know exactly where to look if they want to get to a certain page. Remedy: Use easy-to-recognize navigation buttons to help web visitors know exactly where to look to find answers to their questions.
2. Flash – Flash was cool, but not for long. Not just dignified and pretentious web surfers disapprove of flash, a lot of people do. Excessive use of Flash is a turn off, and makes a website look like it is trying too hard. Remedy: Easy, just limit use of Flash.
3. Pop-up Windows – When a person clicks on a link to visit your website, they don’t want to be ushered into a whole new window. Another tab may be acceptable in certain situations, but in general, links should connect to a website which opens inside their current window. Remedy: Some designers want to use pop-up windows so that their design is opened in window that is the perfect size. Instead, center your design in the middle of the page, so no matter the size of the window a person is using, the design will look A-Okay.
4. Forget the Search – No matter how awesome your navigation is, you must have a search function so people can hunt for something within your website. Remedy: Add search.
5. Dead Link – Nothing is more frustrating than when a person surfing the web comes across a link they just know will connect them to the answer they have been searching for – and then it leads them nowhere. Remedy: Make a plan to check all links regularly and only link to pages which aren’t likely to disappear.
6. Music –It’s just bad decorum to play music on a person’s browser without asking. Remedy: No background music, ever.
7. Spelling and Grammar Errors – Not everyone is a stickler on this, and you personally may think that perfect spelling and grammar are for spelling bee champs, but it is probably a pet peeve of many people in your target audience, and it looks unprofessional. Remedy: Have MULTIPLE people review and edit your web copy. Spell check and grammar check in your word processor is not sufficient.

1. 1. Think local: Small businesses do have one big advantage over competitors who have chain stores all around the area, state, or country, and that is that they are local. More and more, customers are turning local, if not because they want to purchase a reliable product from someone they know they can track down, then because of the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with buying local. Web designers can pull ideas from the local community to help a small business’s website stand out. For example, a business located in Redmond, WA, a town that likes to boast themselves as a bicycle capital, could use bicycles in their design to make things more personal.
2. 2. Get Colorful: Bright color schemes are fun, jazzy, exciting, but not always viewed as the most “professional”. While national brands might need to worry about always coming across as the serious professionals in the room, small businesses have the flexibility to be like the super fun uncle, and use some tastefully bright colors in their web design to make a statement.
3. 3. Be Personal: Small businesses are often owned by one person, family, or a great pair of partners. Web designers can use this to their advantage by including the business owner’s personal story, image, or photos, to give the customers visiting their website the feeling that they have a relationship with the business.
4. 4. Embrace Change: A lot of customers enjoy visiting their favorite local business such as a coffee shop or clothes store on a regular basis, just to see if anything has changed since the last time they popped in. Web designers who regularly change the homepage image or other elements of the site to represent the current trends of people in the community will keep website visitors coming back often, and shopping more often too.
5. 5. Have a Sense of Humor: Small businesses don’t have to worry about offending people the same way big companies do. This gives web designers more creative freedom, within limits of course. Humor is a great way to create buzz and build a loyal following.

Bring in the Test Team

A test team is a group of people who are not familiar with the website you have developed, or preferably they aren’t really even familiar with the company you are working for. This will be asked to navigate a website based on a facilitator’s direction. Such directions include:

• • Get back to the homepage
• • Find the about us link
• • Find where you can contact the company

The web design team will be able to watch and get a feel for what tasks the test team accomplishes easily, and which they struggle with. You can even choose to use an application like Usabilla, which tracks website users so you can see exact times it took for the test team to complete a direction given to them by the facilitator.

Start with Mock-Ups

Rather than just pushing a new web design live, first create and test mock-ups which can be edited to create the most user-friendly site. Mock-ups give you a chance to share your designs with internal and external people and gauge their reactions. Some insightful questions to ask would be:

• • What’s the first thing you see on this page?
• • Can you find x? (ask about a particular navigation)
• • Does anything about this page distract you?

There are websites, online communities, and apps online where you can share your mock-ups and get third party feedback, such as FiveSecondTest.

Check up on your Customers

For many designers and online business owners, it is well worth the money to purchase a product which records the movements and actions of people visiting your website. Even just one month of recorded data will give you a sense of what your customers are attracted to, and areas of the site where they may get lost. One such product which tracks customers’ movements is IntuitionHQ.

After you’ve done your usability testing, be sure to compile the information and make some changes. The more user-friendly your website is, the more likely people will be to visit, look around, and make purchases.

For many years, marketers and researchers thought that banner advertisements were just a tool for finding new customers. Specifically, banner ads were good for raising awareness of a company’s products and for coaxing customers into exploring a new website. While those advantages of banner ads are true, researchers at Chicago Booth discovered that banner advertisements are also a powerful CRM tool, if used correctly.

Remind People to Buy

Window shopping has been raised to a new level with online browsing. It costs a person nothing but a little time to browse through websites without buying anything. While most website owners are happy for the visitors, profits will only come when visitors are converted into paying customers. Banner advertisements increase the chance a person will actually make a purchase. They may not make their purchase the first day they visit a website, but after strategic reminders from banner ads throughout the week while they are online, they are more likely to stop back in and make a purchase than if there were no banner advertisements.

Banner Advertisements are on Par with other Ads

Banner advertisements are inexpensive to make and circulate compared with other popular advertising means such as commercial spots on television or print ads in magazines. The research team from Chicago U discovered that banner ads are pretty consistently successful when compared alongside other advertising options.

The Key is Consistency

While it is tempting to create a ton of different banner advertisement designs to keep things fresh across the web, fewer exposures with more consistent design are actually more likely to bring back repeat customers. A consistent message is a much more effective way to bring customers back to make a purchase.

So why is minimalistic design so powerful? It focuses a viewer in the way nothing else can, and drawing in a customer’s attention is one of the most effective uses of web design. Marketers who are looking for a simple way to cut through the clutter online, can use minimalistic web design to create a peaceful and effective website. Here are some tips for incorporating minimalistic elements into web design:

• • Remove anything that you don’t need: This is the hallmark of minimalism. Looking at something as simple as a logo, a designer driven by minimalism must assess whether or not every color, curve, and angle is actually necessary. While it is overwhelming for a designer to remove every bit of excess from their web design, paring down areas of a website which are a crowded or busy is the perfect first step to minimalistic bliss.
• • Limit use of color: Anyone who has used Photoshop, or opened a box of crayons, knows there are thousands of colors available for them to use, but minimalism calls for limited use of color. While it may feel like regulating color use limits creativity, it actually will make a designer search for the most perfect color, rather than just settling for a mish-mash of subpar hues.
• • Find the white space: White space is touted as a principle in every design style, not just minimalism. Novice designers will fill every part of their web design, thinking white space is just an opportunity to add another image, color, or web copy. White space should instead be used to focus a viewer’s attention on the few most important aspects of the overall web design. By including white space in design, people will also be less likely to feel overwhelmed, which makes them more open to learning about a company’s products and services.
• • Take away until only the best remains: One of the easiest ways to edit a web design project, such as a landing page, is by removing things from the page until it no longer makes sense. Then the designer can put back in the last element he removed and the project will make perfect sense – in its most minimalistic state. Removing the excess and focusing on the most important details will help a company stay true to its brand, mission, and image.

In 1994, Java was introduced to the web, and a few years later around 1997, Java inundated banner advertising. Static images were replaced with animated cartoons blitzing around a person’s computer screen. By 2000, bandwidth and technology had improved and sped up to the point that rich media banner ads got a second wind, but eventually this fad passed as marketers discovered they weren’t getting the responses they were looking for. Most users in 2012 would agree that heavily animated banner advertisements are annoying, even if they do catch the eye.

Animation and graphics weren’t the only changes banner advertisements experienced in 1997, the intelligence of the ads shifted as well when “smart ads” were introduced. These advertisements could collect information from an internet browser’s search history to promote certain products and services that the “smart ad” deemed the user would be most interested in. These types of advertisements still cause privacy controversy today.

The last major moment in the early days of banner advertising was the controversy surrounding how marketers and website owners would purchase banner ads. At first, companies would simply pay x amount of dollars per month to have a certain number of ads spread across the web. Then, marketers discovered that it was easy to track how many clicks their ads were actually getting, and therefore insisted they should only have to pay per click. In 1995 and 1996, banner click through rates were estimated at about 10% all the way up to 50%. By 1997, internet users weren’t so impressed with banner ads anymore, and the click through rate fell to 1%, closer to the .05% it is today. Thus the battle between companies selling banner ad space and marketers purchasing banner ad space began. Today there is an agreed upon combination pricing method which takes into account performance and cost per impression to determine the cost of a banner advertisement campaign.

Although banner ads have changed over the last fifteen years later, they are still a popular way to market online, and a technique which won’t be going away anytime soon.

Power Words are particularly helpful when it comes to smaller online ads where space and a person’s attention span are limited. Banner advertisements in particular must make excellent use of every word in their design. Here are some Power Words perfect for banner advertising design.

• 1. You – When a person reads a company’s banner advertisement and is addressed in the second person – YOU – they will immediately feel like the ad is speaking directly to them. This will make them more likely to sit up and pay attention to the rest of the message.

• 2. New – We don’t always need something old, but we do always want something new. The word NEW is sure to turn some heads.
• 3. Money – Money, money, money. There are songs, books, and movies about money for a reason, people like having and saving it. The familiar word will catch attention in a banner ad.
• 4. Love – Contrasting money, love is free, yet still something many people desire above all else. Catch readers’ attention with the word LOVE.
• 5. Simple – Simplicity is a consumer’s dream. Using the word SIMPLE will relay to a person that a company has what it takes to make their life easier.
• 6. Free – Similar to the Power Word money, FREE is very enticing to almost every demographic.
• 7. More – MORE signifies to readers that a company has something offer customers, something they don’t have enough of, which in a weird way is worse than not having something at all.
• 8. Now – Another powerful three-letter word, NOW gives viewers a sense of urge or immediacy, and will help turn banner advertisement views into click-throughs

Harness the influence of Power Words in your next banner advertising campaign with catchy custom design and copy that demands action.