Placing Banner Advertising on Your Web Site in FrontPage 2002

Many Web sites help fund their online operations with banner ads. Banner ads are rectangular graphics that encourage visitors to buy a product or service (Figure 1 illustrates one example of banner advertising). If your Web site attracts enough daily traffic, you may be able to sell the premium spot at the top of your home page (and other popular pages in your site) to advertisers. Some companies pay a pretty penny for the chance to tout their wares to your visitors.

Figure 1: CNN.com sells its top spot to advertisers.

Banner ads also lend a whiff of legitimacy to your site. The clever folks at LinkExchange came up with the idea of letting subscribers swap banner ads with other subscribers in the network. That way, everyone gets the cool look of a rotating banner ad display, plus Web-wide exposure, for free.

FrontPage attempts to help you include banner advertising in your site by providing you with a Web component called the Banner Ad Manager. Helpful in theory, this component creates a rotating display of ads in your site. You control the amount of time each ad appears on the page and the transition effect between ads. In practice, however, the Banner Ad Manager doesn't do such a good job. It lacks the crucial ability to link each ad to its own unique Web address, which is why most companies buy ad space in the first place.

More useful is the bCentral Banner Ad component. This Web component hooks you into the LinkExchange Banner Network (now a Microsoft bCentral partner). This Web component not only places the appropriate code into your page's HTML, but also takes you through the process of creating a simple banner graphic for your own site — no experience necessary. In fact, the Web component is so well explained in its various Wizard-style dialog boxes that providing step-by-step instructions here would be redundant. Give this Web component a shot — you'll see just how easy it is to use.

To access the bCentral Banner Network component, choose Insert-->Web Component to display the Insert Web Component dialog box. In the dialog box's Component Type list box, click bCentral Web Components, and double-click bCentral Banner Ad in the corresponding list. The dialog box that appears leads you through the rest of the process.

To use the bCentral Banner Ad component, you must have a valid Web address — that is, you must know the address that visitors will enter in their browsers to view your site.

The bCentral Banner Ad Web component integrates you into the world of free banner advertising. If you want to sell advertising space and rotate the display of paid ads, your best bet is to contract the services of a consultant who can create an ad display for you. If you're comfortable working with HTML and server-side scripts (also known as CGI scripts), and your Web hosting provider allows CGI script use, you can download and use a free rotating image script.