Flash Banners: Content and Design Considerations

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Flash banners can be a great addition to a website and can be a great way to convey important information in a visually attractive manner. In order to make them as effective as possible, there are some important content and design considerations that should be kept in mind when creating the banner.

Flash banners are useful because they can convey more information than you would normally be able to if you were using static images and unchanging content alone. This is especially true if you’re looking to communicate more than one point or display more than one photo, and if you only have a limited amount of space to do that.

As the designer, it’s important that you convey to a client that while making a Flash banner is easy for you to do, making an effective one (and incorporating it onto the website) is another story.

Here are some of the content and design considerations that I talk about with my clients in order to make their Flash banners as effective as possible.

Content considerations

• Keep it short and simple – If you’re using a banner with transitioning content, keep the written words short enough so that people can read them quickly and so that you can maintain a decent transition pace. Short phrases or no more than 1-2 sentences are ideal.
• Use call to action words – Flash banners attract attention because the motion catches people’s attention. Take advantage of that and emphasize your call-to-action in your banner. Keep the content you include in them action-oriented, and you’ll definitely help your own cause.
• They’re not good for SEO – Content embedded in Flash banners can’t be found by the search engine crawlers, which only find words on a page. Make sure to emphasize any keywords or content within your Flash banner elsewhere on the page where the crawlers will be able to find them.
• Remember to style links in them – You can include links in your banner, even if the banner itself isn’t SEO-friendly. Just remember that you should style those links to look like links should – after all, how the links are styled helps make them effective and usable.

Design considerations

• Use to shorten the homepage – Flash banners are a great way to convey more information in a limited amount of visual space, which is perfect for designers concerned with homepage usability. This will help make your homepage shorter, more concise, and more usable.
• Use on the homepage only – A Flash banner on a website’s homepage is a great-looking accent. A Flash banner on every page of a website (in the header, footer, etc.) is just distracting and becomes annoying after only a few visits to the website. Use it once, and leave it at that.
• Leave long gaps between transitions – When rotating content, leave a long enough gap so that people have time to really notice what the content is saying or what message the photo is trying to convey. Slow and steady is the key – transitions that come too quickly will overwhelm your visitors.
• Use photos to match your message – Photos can say a lot about your organization or business, so make sure to use ones that really emphasize what you want to convey about yourself. You don’t have to use a lot of them – 4-6 are usually enough to make the point.
• Shouldn’t be overwhelming in size – Your Flash banner shouldn’t be so large that it visually dominates and overwhelms the homepage. Limiting the banner to perhaps 2/3 the width of the main content area and floating it to one side is enough to achieve the effect you want.

2 key things to remember

• Get it right the first time – You have, at most, one chance to get someone to watch your Flash banner in its entirety, and that’s when someone is visiting your website for the first time. Once they become return visitors, they’re much more likely to go right to the content that they’re looking for and skip your banner – or your homepage – altogether.
• Not the primary means of delivering content – While Flash banners are great as accents, they shouldn’t be a primary means of delivering content on your homepage. If you want to incorporate content or a vital link within a banner, make sure to place it elsewhere on the page. You should always assume that the banner won’t be watched in its entirety and the content in it won’t be delivered.

Thoughts?

Do you have any suggestions for how make Flash banners more effective that I didn’t mention here? If so, share them or any other useful information with everyone by leaving a comment below!

One Comment

1. 

   Reply

   essex website designers wrote on July 27, 2010:

   Hey there
   I work for a web designers in Essex and we cover all areas of design and anything else google related, the most important thing about design is catching the attention of the person viewing the site, a site only has 6-8 seconds to do this so the use of flash images is very important to the look and feel of the site.

   some helpful points here

   thanks

   Posted at 4:16 am

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