Optimizing web banners

[~jc]

Hi there,

I'm new at designing web banners. Which is a better media - Flash or gif? Could anyone provide some suggestions on keeping the file size down?

Any online tutorials you can recommend for designing web banners?

Thanks in advance!

cheers,
judy

[jord1712]

i dont no but i use jpeg or gif

[SiteExpress]

Well, IMO, I prefer .gif. Only because I dont like flash to be the first thing a search engine finds on my site. Also, with a gif, you can use alt tags, and provide a little info for the visitors that dont have all of the plugins. If you go with Flash, there will always be a percentage of people that dont have flash plugins, and cant see your banners.

[veggie1232]

flash is better lol gif is poor quality

[ISDProductions]

It depends on weather or not you want it animated. Flash will look much better for animation than gif. Choose .gif or .jpeg if you just want a picture of sort. I wouldn't worry about the search spiders seeing the flash, just as long as you have some quality content it can read as well. One thing i would suggest is to just see for yourself. Build your banner in flash, and then export it as a .swf and as a .gif (just change the file type when exporting :)

[netware]

i'll have to disagree, 9/10 people have the flash player, and if they dont have it, its easy to install and its small too. the crawlers might not index full flash sites, but there is always a way to go around, and manage to get it crawled.

flash gives you more freedom as a designer

[Arkette]

i'll have to disagree, 9/10 people have the flash player, and if they dont have it, its easy to install and its small too. the crawlers might not index full flash sites, but there is always a way to go around, and manage to get it crawled.

flash gives you more freedom as a designer
Sorry but I have to take issue with your 9/10 figure. At least half of all people surf the internet at work on company networks that don't allow activeX components to be downloaded or run and that includes Flash animations.