We have all seen them, we have all at some point in time clicked upon one of them, and in fact it is now almost impossible not to find banner advertising on all of the major sites.

With advertising rates seeming to rise almost on a daily basis it is imperative that the banner being advertised is the most effective banner you could possibly have, as this should in theory lead to the greatest success for your marketing campaign.

However before we get to grips with designing the perfect banner perhaps I had better describe what the perfect banner means to me, in fact there are two distinct schools of thought on this:

• The perfect banner should principally drive visitors to our site.

The main aim of this type of banner is to generate visitors; these visitors may or may not be interested in the actual web site that is displayed once the banner is clicked.

This type of advertising campaign works on the principle of the more people that visit the more sales I must generate. this I'm afraid is not quite true.

Personally I do not like these types of banner campaigns as they invariably aim to trick people into visiting your Web site, this often has a counter effect in that as soon as they are able the visitor leaves your Web site.

• The perfect banner should drive targeted visitors to our site.

This is in my opinion the best type of banner you can utilise. Not only is it aimed at delivering highly targeted visitors to your Web site but it invariably also generates more customers and long term business as many people visiting your Web site will add you to their favourites list for possible future investigation.

These banners will only bring in a fraction of the visitor figures when compared to the other main type of campaign.  However, the targeted visitors they do bring are almost always interested in your company's services or products and are therefore more likely to become potential customers either now or in the future.

Now, I'm going to try and explain how to design the perfect banner and believe it or not I don't actually consider myself to be the best source of knowledge for this.  However, owning a small banner exchange program and viewing the results being generated by the various banners, I do get to know what works and what doesn't and thus I feel that I am perhaps better qualified than most to discuss this subject matter.

So what does make the perfect banner, well the first thing you need to define is the actual size of the banner you have to work with. The most popular banner size is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels in height, many Web sites also utilise a maximum file size as well, however if you're paying for advertising this can often be negotiated.

This is your canvas to create your masterpiece on, what you now need to decide is just exactly what information needs to be displayed and how this should be presented. Spend a few minutes thinking on this and you will soon realise just how difficult it is to come up with something that works.

The banner needs "C.I.E.", for want of a better term, it needs to:

• C - contain a Call to action.
• I - contain relevant Information.
• E - be Eye catching.

The Call to action is typically a text message saying ""Click Here".  Believe it or not simply adding this statement to your banner will often double the amount of click throughs the banner generates, as people know what they have to do and if they are interested they generally will do it.

By designing a banner that contains relevant information, you are making sure that the people who click your banner are the people that are interested in your service. This type of visitor will more than likely be a close match to your ideal visitor as they will be visiting your Web site because they are interested in what services or products you have.

The banner needs to be eye catching; as it needs to compete with everything else that is displayed on the Web page. It needs to draw the visitor's eye and hold it there for a few seconds while the information in your banner is read and digested.

The best way to demonstrate this, is to actually show you a couple of Website Designs own banners:

Both of these banners are regularly used within the Website Designs banner exchange network, with each one so far being responsible for sending through hundreds of potential visitors/clients.

Having looked at these banners you might like to view a few more, all you need to do is visit the banner page on the Website Designs ( www.website-designs.com ) Web site and view a few more banners, or alternatively have a look at the members of our banner exchange. some of these will be good examples others will be extremely poor examples, see if you can spot the difference.