DR. WEBSITE
Where to Find Tools For Managing Banner Advertising
Dear Dr. Website®: Our site has grown to the point where we're soliciting major advertisers, and we want to be prepared to implement banner advertisements, rotate them and keep track of the responses. Where can I find a program to streamline displaying and tracking banner ads on our site?
There are several commercial products and services for managing advertising for a site, with widely varying pricing scales. Web Elite has a product called Ad Master designed to help Web sites place, rotate and track banner advertisements, including generating content dynamically. The company also offers on its Web site a free 45-day demo of its ad management software, which runs on most Unix platforms.
At the high-priced end, one big-league vendor is NetGravity, whose AdServer software includes automated scheduling techniques based on impressions to maximize hits for advertisers and ad targeting based on keyword entries. AdServer runs on Windows NT and most Unix platforms. A 30-minute online demo of NetGravity's AdServer is available on the company's site.
While both of these services enable your site to retain control over your advertisers' content and ads, you should note that another approach to Web ad campaign management is used by centralized Web advertising services like Double Click and Focalink's SmartBanner, which give advertisers site-by-site comparisons of ad responses.
Dear Dr. Website®: I'm looking for an easy way to include a graphical index on my company's site. How do client-side imagemaps work?
Unlike imagemaps that depend on the server for their processing, client-side imagemaps require no CGI scripting in order to work. With client-side imagemaps, the "hot spots" that users click to jump to new locations are specified in your HTML coding instead. You would use the <MAP> tag, which is supported in the HTML 3.2 draft specifications, to embed a map file, and <AREA> tags to define each hot spot's shape and attributes.
Client-side imagemaps, therefore, provide a good solution for content developers who don't have the time or readily available access to resources for implementing imagemaps. The client-side approach also frees designers from needing access to their site's cgi-bin directory, where interactive scripts are usually stored; depending on your company's security concerns, those access privileges may be granted to only a few users or just to the site's administrators.
The catch is that not all browsers support client-side imagemaps, so they won't work if your visitors are using, for example, a version of Netscape Navigator earlier than 2.0. But if you can ensure that your user audience is standardized on a browser that supports them--for example, on a corporate intranet--then client-side imagemaps are the easy way for you to create a graphical index for your site.
A couple of useful online resources for further information about client-side imagemaps and the syntax to use in your HTML documents can be found at Netscape's Extensions to HTML 3.0 page and Microsoft's HTML Support: Client Side Images page.
Send your site development questions to Dr. Website at drweb@internet.com, or visit the Ask Dr. Website page.
Reprinted from Web Week, Volume 2, Issue 8, June 17, 1996 © internet.com Corporation All rights reserved. Keywords: site-management, advertising Date: 19960617
