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Banners For Beginners (Part 2) Choosing Banner Making Software

Welcome to Part 2 of this Banner Tutorial, which is all about creating banners for your website!

If you recall from Banners For Beginners (Part 1) - How To Make Banners, we agreed that the best way to get just the right banner for your very own website is to create the banner yourself.

So, where do you start?

Well, there are two basic components to banner creation.

Firstly, of course, you must have some idea, a spark of creativity. (And it doesn't matter if you're not the creative type - I wasn't, until I went on an Edward de Bono Creative Thinking course many years ago and learned that there are rules you can apply to be creative - but that's an entire other subject.)

By all means, look through clip-art collections, but it is better to treat these as catalysts for your own ideas. (The banner for this website came about like this - I was looking through for computer-related images and saw that each letter on the keyboard had its own image, and that's what prompted the creation of this banner.) Clip-art can be good quality, but it can also look a bit cheesy if you're not careful, and you probably don't want to convey that message about your website.

What you want is something that is eye-catching, possibly quirky, maybe humorous and mainly, but not always, relevant to your website.

You can also consider animated banners, but you do need to be careful with these, as they can irritate people, which is not exactly the idea. It is also more time-consuming to create animated banners, as you typically need to create several different images.

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You will also need to consider the size and shape of your banner, bearing in mind that the "standard" banner is 468 x 60 pixels, as this will affect how quickly it displays on your visitor's web browser.

Secondly, you will need some software with which to turn your idea into reality. There are many products on the market that will meet your needs, from some basic free ones (again, do a search on the Internet and you will find plenty, including the popular GIMP), all the way up to the Rolls Royce of them all - Adobe Photoshop. Personally, I use Paint Shop Pro (v7, although later versions are now available), but there's plenty to choose from to suit all needs and budgets.

There are some features that you will want to make sure are available, and all of these will be explained further in the help files for the software you choose:

• various selection tools, so that you can work on very specific parts of your banner without affecting other parts
• a good range of painting tools (e.g. pencil, airbrush, flood fill)
• some image manipulation tools (e.g. image rotation, image mirroring, resizing)
• text tools, so you can write some content into your banner
• layers, which will make the job of building up your banners bit by bit (and changing them later) much easier
• the ability to zoom in to work on small areas of your banner in fine detail
• being able to work with the three most popular image formats for the Internet - JPG, GIF and PNG
• some special effects (e.g. blur, textures) are useful occasionally.

Most packages will contain far more features than these, and more than you will need.

The only other thing to consider is whether you will want to create animated banners, as not all software handles these. (I use Animation Shop, which comes from the same company that sells Paint Shop Pro, and it may even come bundled in the same package.)

So, you've got an idea for a banner and you've got the tools with which to create that banner. Now what?

This is covered in Banners For Beginners (Part 3) - Creating Banners.

About The Author:

Mark Farrar has been building websites since 1997, both for personal and business use, and is the co-founder and webmaster of www.WealthyTeddy.co.uk, incorporating www.AllKindsOfShiznit.com, amongst many others.

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