See our pick of the month for September

WORK AT HOME

Work At Home Ideas

Affiliate Marketing Online

Christian Craftwork

Get Paid To Give
Away Credit Cards

Earn Money Writing
Short Articles

Make Money
From Blogging

Data Entry Online

Make Money Online

Online Surveys
Work at home

Type At Home
Home Typing Contracts

Work At Home
Online Jobs - start today

Home Based Work
Medical Transcription Work at Home

Virtual Assistant
Home Workers needed

Disciple's Cross
Christian Work at Home

Home Jobs
Work online - P/Time

Work At Home
Freelance Jobs

Home Craft Work

Work From Home and Glorify Christ at the same time by simply making Little Crosses. Disciple's Cross

Give Away Credit Cards

Home Based Business

Freelance Work At Home

Adding banners to your web pages

Adding a banner to your webpage is easily done: all it involves is pasting or typing a small piece of html code into your webpage at the spot you want the banner to appear.

The html code for a banner is in two parts: one part is the link to the place you want your website visitors to land when they click on the banner; the other part is the location of the image for the banner.

Typical html code for a banner looks like this:

‹img src="/images/bannername.gif" width=468 height=60 alt="name"›
‹a href="destinationaddress.html"›

The first part relates to the image and the second is the link to the landing page.

The "img" indicates that we are looking for an image rather than text. The "src" stands for "source" ie where to find the image.

The ‹"/images/bannername.gif"› is the exact place the banner is stored. Note that the image file has the extension ".gif", alternatively it might have the extension ".jpg", but "gif" is more commonly used. This tells the browser that it has to display an image file as opposed to a text file.

Following the address of the image are three further commands (referred to as "tags"). These are width, height and alt. The first two are pretty self-explanatory: they define how much space (and the exact dimensions of the space) will be needed to display the banner when it loads. The dimensions shown in the example are a standard banner size. The final instruction is the "alt tag". This is a piece of text that will appear in place of the image if, for any reason, the image cannot be displayed. If the image fails to load, instead of viewing a blank space, the visitor can see the text and decide whether to click through even though no picture can be seen. This tag should always be used. Apart from giving your visitor something to look at in the absence of the banner, it assists search engines when they crawl your webpages: search engines read text, they cannot read images.

The above example assumes that the image for the banner is hosted on your website in a folder named "images". If the image is stored elsewhere on the Internet, you need to put in the full name of the url where it is stored. Hosting the images for banners on your website rather than linking to them on other websites is normally the preferred method of dealing with banners because it speeds up the loading time for your web page. It also avoids the situation where a banner you have linked to directly is moved by the website owner. If this happens, you will be left with a blank space on your webpage. If you do not host the image yourself, the picture for the banner has to be brought from another website which will obviously take longer. When you are considering page loading speeds, you are dealing in seconds and partial seconds: you will lose impatient visitors if your website loads too slowly.

It is very easy to save banner images from other websites in an images directory at your website. You firstly need to make a copy of the banner and save it to your computer hard drive. Then you simply upload the image from your computer to your website via your website control panel.

To copy the image for a banner put your mouse over the image and right click. From the menu that will appear, click on "save image as", put in the name you want to use for the image and the name of the directory where you save images on your computer.

Then log in to your website control panel, where you need to go to the directory where you save images. Select the "upload files" function which allows you to "browse" your pc hard drive in order to locate the image you want. Click on the image and then click the "upload files" button in your control panel.

These instructions can be applied to uploading any image you want, not just banners. If you simply want to display a picture on your website without using it as a link, all you need to do is use the part of the code that calls for the image:
‹img src="/images/bannername.gif" width=125 height=125 alt="name"›

The above example again uses a standard banner size but you can change the dimensions to any size to suit your web pages.