Everyone's familiar with the banners which appear on search engines and other large websites. These are largely perceived as an annoyance, and some people even purchase software which claims to filter them out! Of course the main reason people dislike them is that they interrupt your train of thought. You go to a search engine looking for a holiday, the last thing you want to hear about is a new financial investment product!

However, at Room101 we believe that a banner site can be a useful addition to most websites. "But who's going to advertise on my site?" you ask. Well with most of the sites we design, the banners simply advertise other parts of the same web site. This may seem a little redundant, afterall, people can easily get to any part of your website just by following the links on the homepage or clicking on the toolbar. True, but there's no harm in providing more than one way of getting someplace, and it also addresses another issue with website visitors.

Many people will browse a website in a slightly casual frame of mind (perhaps that's why it's called surfing). They may not be fully aware of exactly what they're looking for, and it's not unusual for them to click on a menu item more or less at random, just to play with the site and see what's there. The downside of this is that they may end up in a cul-de-sac so to speak, some part of your website which isn't relevent to their enquiry. Rather than dead-end them at this point, a banner which changes every 10 seconds or so, will be occasionally prompting them to try something else, "Have you heard about our special offer on Carribean Cruises?", or maybe "Did you know we also sell travel insurance?".

Although we implement banner sites mainly for this internal promotion purpose, it does mean that if you do want to put up a banner for someone else's site, you're in a great position to do that quickly and easily. Perhaps you have a friendly company whose business nicely complements your own - you could propose a banner swap deal where they drive traffic to your site, and you also carry one of their banners by way of return.

Room101 operates a banner advertising scheme for our clients, you can participate either by providing a banner (we can make one) advertising your own site, or by installing a banners area on your homepage where your advertisers can get exposure. Which you do will largely depend on the amount of traffic you have - a site with lots of traffic will be more interested in earning revenue , whereas if your site has just started up, you're more likely to be interested in generating additional traffic.
101 Ads provides for both these possibilities - click on the link for more information.