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Boost Your Website Traffic Using a Flash Animated Banner

By Ko Fai Godfrey Ko

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 15Oct2010 Word count: 770 Viewed: 226 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Web based interactivity and communication has become increasingly important in our daily lives. It is known that sales of printed magazines, paper maps have declined dramatically, while online video, online game, blog, interactive map grow in popularity. In order to increase your online presence, your enterprise can use a stunning website to capture a visitor's eye, accompanied by a streaming video clip to let customers understand your business better than mere words. What's more, a photo slideshow can transform static images into entertaining animation to deliver visual enhancement. It would be great if an interactive map could be inserted into the website as well, with clickable and animated Flash map icons showing the route to reach the branch offices.

Apart from video player, music files, attractive website and interactive map, banner ads are another elements commonly used in recent years to attract more visitors to the websites. You will find that banner ads is one of the best ways to advertise and promote your business online. Compared to the ads in newspapers, magazines and TV, you can get the response and feedback easily and instantly from your target audiences. When you place the ads on those traditional media channels, readers may have interest in what you offer but may not act immediately. It is easy for them to forget the ads after a few days, or even a few minutes so you can hardly get response from them. Even if they purchase your product or service after sometime, perhaps a bottle of conditioner in a supermarket, can you identify what factors influence them to make a purchase decision, after reading an ad on newspapers, TV shows or others? These factors can only be figured out by various studies and research, which may involve a considerable amount of money and time. However, banner advertising is entirely different from its counterparts as potential customers can act on curiosity instantly after reading your banner ads. For example, when visitors click on the banner and it will take them to your official site where you are offering the services or products. If they would like to buy, they will place the order in your website online.

In the past, static image banners were heavily used to attract traffic to websites. These banner ads were constructed from static image formats like JPG, GIF or PNG using image editing tools and only those with image editing skills can be able to create professional banner ads. With the advancement of technology, professional banner designers start employing Flash, and other multimedia objects such as video, sound, movie into the banner ads to maximize presence. As vector based images are drawn, Flash banner ads can deliver great looking graphics which load quickly and get your message to target audiences in no time. You should bear in mind that humans are impatient creatures, they will leave your site within a few seconds if it takes endless load time just to watch your ad. Another benefit of using vector graphics is that users can resize the banner into any browser-friendly dimension without degrading the image quality as you do with pixel based bitmap images.

Unlike the conventional static graphic banners, the Flash banner ads ensure relatively click through rate due to the eye catchy effect they offer. Web visitors not only love viewing something professional, but also those can move and grab their attention. Rotate images, video clips, sound and fade in text animation effect can attract users and enhance their website navigation, while adequate use of roll over effects can further allow users to interact with the banner and read additional information. By rolling over the banner, readers are exposed to more panels with additional messaging. Imagine you are going to create a Flash banner for your fitness product, you can insert different options for losing weight such as 'doing exercise', 'on diet', 'taking medicine', etc, and the downsides of each method will be presented with rollover, and you can also highlight the main advantages of your product over those methods, with a colorful 'Buy' button directing viewers to your site.

If you are not an expert in Flash design, just select one of the numerous Flash banner templates designed by Flash banner developers, and replace the text, images and animation with yours using Adobe Flash. Finally, you have to save the banner, export it into Flash SWF and upload it to your server. Some companies also create custom Flash banner according to customers' requirement, don't bother on how much you are going to spend since the banners that can run smoothly, transmit the message quickly always worth the investment.

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