These are a collection of ten tips we would like to share. We are confident they will help you make better banners, no matter how much experience you may already have!

1. Punch Line – DO take as much time as you can to come up with the right punch line on your banner. Try and look at it through the eyes of the end user. Can you come up with a line that you are sure will entice the user to go ahead and click on the button? Use it!

2. Excellent Copy – an effective banner needs to display good copy. Keep the text short and to the point. The more text you have in there, the more cluttered would the banner appear. This text should be supportive of your punch line, and be along the same lines but maybe a little more descriptive of what the user can expect after clicking on the link.

3. use Relevant Content – Your banner needs to display relevant content, period! You may be tempted to use images of skimpily clad women to entice the user to click on your banner! But what good would even that click do, if your web site is aimed at selling electronic goods? So keep it relevant, and avoid such short cuts.

4. Use a Logo and a Site URL – If you are focusing on brand building, why not use both logo and url in your banner? Don’t make them too large though – both can be sized down to a corner of the banner – you need the space for your tag line and copy!

5. Use Cliches – A simplistic phrase such as ‘click here’ is what works at the end of the day, and you can find relevant statistics if you put it to the test. Make sure the phrase is displayed for at least two or three seconds on your banner. You could use it as the last frame in an animation.

6. The File Size – You need to keep the k size as low as possible. The reason is banners should be the first element to load on your page. The banner being right on top, you want the viewers to see it before they scroll down to the rest of the page.

7. The Length of Animated Banners – Studies show us that the average user spends no more than ten seconds looking at a banner. You need to show all you want to show through your animation in about 7 or 8 seconds at a maximum! If you action call (click here) shows up AFTER this time period, chances are the banner would lose its efficiency.

8. To Animate or Not to Animate – Animated banners can get you something like a 30% higher click rate! The disadvantage is animated banners are of larger k sizes. You can minimize this by using fewer colors!

9. Using Flash – Flash can add a huge potential to your banner design skills. Flash banners are any day smoother than GIF animations. Moreover, the file sizes are smaller as well.

10. Blue Underlines – Web users relate blue underlined text to links, so you may want to underline the text that says ‘click here’.