Something Interactive

I am creating a unique set of banner advertisements for a client of mine and after quite an exhaustive search, without having to actually force myself or anyone into creating an AdWords account to glean more information I managed to come up with a list of how I believe Google AdWords advertising works with flash banners:

1. in your AdWords account, you create a campaign
2. the campain has details for keywords and descriptions of the campaign for relevance
3. you then input the destination for the campaign banners (http://www.yourwebsite.com/destination/)
4. then you upload your set of banners to the campaign (swfs, gifs, jpgs, or pngs)
5. then you pay for an advertising exposure package (how much money determines the quality of your campaigns exposure on Google’s advertising network)
6. the rest, is all done by Google’s servers and their advertising network

Google’s advertising partners must all have a specific set of javascript codes on their website to handle the banners embedded on their website by Google.
If your banner shows up on XYZ.com,.. then XYZ.com’s website has this javascript code to handle the ClickTag embedded in that Flash banner.
As well, XYZ.com’s website already knows to go to the destination (http://www.yourwebsite.com/destination/) because it got it from Google (when you gave it to Google in your campaign in your AdWords account).
Google dynamically provided your campaign destination to their advertising partners, only when the banner was displayed on their ad partners’ websites.

In the meantime, the ClickTag, also allows Google to record how many people have clicked on a specific banner – and this allows them to provide a whole set of statistics based around the campaign – whether more money needs to be invested in the advertising, or maybe the banner needs to be more eye-catching.

I found a website that explains the latest Actionscript 3 code to put into Flash (for Adobe Flash CS3 or CS4) for banners to be effective on Google’s advertising network of partners:

http://www.genelu.com/content/view/98/1

I hope this explains things a bit better, and regardless the banner should end up working once it’s uploaded to Google AdWords.

Gotta love people who think about the big fixes to little problems!

threemagination :: web.mobile.social..

Well I must say that this is pretty cool!
Adobe Flash .. your days are numbered, the only thing you’ll be good for is video,.. then again, html5 has that too.

Raphaël—JavaScript Library.

If you’re a multi-window user (windows not maximized to full screen) or have a computer with a lower resolution and navigate to anybody’s Twitter page, you may have problems viewing their background image because of the twitter page framework that overlays on the page.

I came across a couple blogs that solely advertised their services of creating eye-catching, advertising backgrounds for anyone’s Twitter page.

This my friends, is a HUGE rip-off – and here’s why:

1. Twitter’s backgrounds are left aligned, yet their content framework is center aligned. This will always block the background at inconvenient proportions.
2. If you try to display information like phone numbers, email addresses, or website addresses in the background picture (as a result of point 1) will be cut off or impossibly unreadable due to the maximum amount of space available between the left side of the page and the left side of the content framework.
3. People who are savvy enough to use Twitter, don’t even use the Twitter website, in favour of social media aggregator/updater apps. They sanitize the content to just the Tweets alone, so the backgrounds aren’t even seen.

I don’t have statistics on how many people use Twitter, what their resolutions or screen sizes are, or what apps they use to aggregate Twitter with, but not once have I ever been impressed with someone’s twitter background that has advertising material to promote themselves. Phone numbers, email or website addresses are constantly cut off, and even photos of the Twitter profile user are cut off or whatever they are trying to sell is cut off or blocked by the Twitter content framework.

Twitter needs to add a little more customization to their user profile stylesheet management first before I would ever consider using the background of my Twitter page as another avenue to advertise myself.
Instead, for my Twitter profile, I have ingeniously used one of my artwork pieces and created a simple pattern out of it; there isn’t any important information being cut off, and aesthetic quality of the background image adds a truly unique expression of creativity.

And those other people who are charging money to create custom Twitter backgrounds, I tip my hat off to you; you’re making money from being scrupulous thieves and selling graphics that don’t do their job very well.

The following screen shots were taken at the very popular 1024×768 resolution.

When you find yourself coding a website for multiple browsers and get all caught up with going to the extremes of using browser hacks just to try and meet your personal visual standards verses the W3C compliant standards, you find yourself at a crossroad where both standards are at jeopardy.

What do you do? Which standard should you favour?

You’ve got to make a decision on what is most important, and while you may not like the result, you can justify it with this simple reasoning I read in a blog comment from Brad Czerniak that perfectly sums up how you should approach the solution:

I personally don’t find it necessary for everything to look exactly the same in all browsers, and this is a good example of a place where a minor difference makes a modern browser look good and a legacy browser still function properly.

Take the extremes of web design/development: you want to make the content still accessible on the worst of browsers (ie LYNX), yet display the content as beautifully as possible if they have the best and latest browser versions (ie Firefox 3).

What are the tools/browsers of your ideal audience?
When and how do you show your antiquated audience that they’re missing out?
When and how do you reward your savvy audience?

Lastly, where will you draw the line?