Dynamic banners continued

Posted January 17th, 2008 by ottodv

I have had an interesting e-mail exchange with Jeremy in which we discussed some ideas about dynamic banners. Since we think it would be beneficial to discuss further in this group, so that others can participate, I'll try to post the most important points we discussed here.

  • How dynamic should the banner be? Just two cases, Firefox users get to see one, other browsers get to see the other, or should the banner vary, ie show one of several banners randomly. I have been using a dynamic banner like that on my most popular page (in the little frame on the right) for some time now, which shows a selection of open source products or services (though most is for Firefox), depending on what browser someone is using.
  • We are planning to make 3 different prototype dynamic banners, with different approaches to the problem, to further the discussion.
  • Should we show only Firefox related banners or or also show banners for other open source products (as I do in my example). We feel that official Firefox dynamic banners should not, but people should be free to modify the code to do such things on their own sites.
  • We need to have more banners and buttons to choose from. Especially for the alternative banners (like join SFx) of which there are currently few.
  • There must be sets of banners and their alternatives of the same size. So that the banner takes up the same space on a site regardless of which product is advertised.

I may have forgotten some points. Feel free to join in on the discussion and give your opinion.

- Otto

‹ Firefox buttons like a badge Proposal for dynamic banners ›

Current prototypes

On January 17th, 2008 jglassenberg says:
As of right one of our three intended prototypes are available online (http://www.jeremyglassenberg.com/MozillaBannerGenerator.html). This prototype allows users to select one banner to show to non-Firefox users and one banner for Firefox users, relying on Javascript. The other prototypes should be available soon, but in the meantime Otto posted that nice example of dynamic banners for Firefox.

While waiting for the other prototypes, some of our points of discussion apply to the first prototype. For example, we only have two banners to display for Firefox users - a "Spread Firefox" banner, and a Thunderbird banner. Besides providing limited options we do not have banners of comparable sizes to all of the "get Firefox" banners. We could therefore use plenty "Spread Firefox" banners to complement the "get Firefox" banners, and would appreciate the assistance of any graphics designers.

We would also like to hear any ideas that might make these banners more appealing to widget developers. The current prototype has a feature to auto-close a banner. This feature is intended for widget developers who do not want a banner to take up space inside a small web app. Please feel free to try out that feature and let us know if you experience any problems, or if you have any other ideas that could appeal to widget developers.

-Jeremy

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