Before designing a web banner ad, the banner designer should find out why you require a banner. He/she wants to know whether you need your banner to be placed on other website to promote your own site, you want to exchange banners with other sites, you are going to start your own affiliation program or you have to display your own banners and banners of other sites on your site.

The designer will design the banner only after knowing the purpose of the banner. If you want to promote your company then the designer will include your company logo and website address in your web banner design. And when you explain the exact purpose of your banner he/she will select an appropriate file format for the banner ad.

The most common file formats used by banner designers are gif, PNG, SWF and JPEG. The mostly used file format gif is supported by web publishers and this file simply shows a series of images. PNG, generated to replace gif, provides lossless data compression. PNG is a bitmap format. Since both gif and PNG are lossless data formats these are better options to display text and images. JPEG and PNG allow up to 16.777,216 colors where as gif allows only 256 colors. As SWF file contains animations for the web banner it can be used to exhibit superior quality animations on the banner.

A smart banner designer has to keep all these factors in mind when he/she starts designing your banner. He/she will design your banner based on your purpose and the status of your market. You require a banner that catches the attention of viewers. To achieve this end, the designer creates a banner using proper color combination and a catchy punch line for your web banner design. But be very careful about the loading time of the banner. Don’t test the patience of the visitors. People are prompted to click a banner ad with a very low loading time.

Again, you have several online banner design services that can design a banner according to your requirements. The skilled designers of such companies provide a style guide that contains various aspects of web banner designing like banner size, layout, color etc…etc…What you have to do, just select and send your banner details to the designer. Some companies even offer free services, but their designs will not be unique because they apply pre-designed templates for the banner designing.

Using banner creation software for designing web banner is another option for you. The entire banner designing process becomes very easy and cost-effective with the application of such software. But the major drawback with such an application is that you get designs based on pre-designed images and templates only.