Advertising Administration

The advertising functionality has been created free of charge in order to assist you in generating funds for your organisation. Octo-Xpressions reserve the right to utilise any advert position at any time without prior notice and by the act of using the advert functionality, you unconditionally acknowledge and agree to this condition.

Overview

There are two types of advert, the header or banner advert and the side adverts.

The header advert sits at the top of the page above the menu and depending on the site layout you have chosen, will either be below or to the side of the logo. The chosen site template also dictates the width of the logo, with templates 1, 2, 3 and 4 having a width of 940 pixels, templates 5 and 6, 700 pixels and templates 7 and 8, 620 pixels.

There are 5 side adverts arranged from top to bottom though the positions are not fixed. In the event a position is not filled and the one beneath it is, the one beneath will move up to occupy the missing adverts position. If the missing advert is subsequently filled, the lower ranked advert will be forced down. The sizes of the adverts follow the same approach as the header adverts and are determined by the site template you choose to use with templates 1, 2, 5 and 6 having a width of 220 pixels and templates 3, 4, 7 and 8 a width of 300 pixels.

The websites for some organisations may be sponsored and paid for by a third party. In this case, the first side advert position is reserved exclusively for thier use.

There is no restriction on the height of an advert.

Creating adverts - Please read


There are a few things to take into account when physically creating the advert images.
  1. To ensure the best clarity, make the width of your banner images 940 pixels
    For side adverts, make the width 300 pixels. The system will resize as necessary but if the image is too small to start with, may not look very good when presented.
  2. Avoid animated gifs - they are unsupported. It appears as though some work and this is probably due to how they are created however, others do not work and various problems arise, from transition through to display issues.
    If you wish to have an animated gif effect, the best way is to simply create multiple single images and add them all to the slider.
  3. Use a good quality image editor to create your images and ensure you make them as small (disk size) as possible and bear in mind that when the page first loads, all images need to be downloaded unless they are already in the browser cache. If the images are too big, this will drastically slow down the load time of the page and will most likely lead to user dissatisfaction.

    A good indication for image sizes would be; Banner Advert: max 70Kb, acceptable, 40kb, perfect < 20kb. For side adverts, max 40kb, acceptable, around 20kb, perfect < 10kb.
    Google "resize images" to find online resources and downloadable programs to help reduce the file size of your adverts.

  4. There are a number of free image editors available for use and a quick search on the web will pull up many tutorials for each of them;
    Paint.Net
    Paint.NET is a free image and photo manipulation software for Windows. Paint.NET features layers, painting and drawing tools, special effects, unlimited undo history, and levels adjustments.
    Gimp
    GIMP is a popular open-source image editor Unix/Linux and Windows. Often lauded as the "free Photoshop," it does have an interface and features similar to Photoshop, but with a steep learning curve to match.
    LazPaint
    LazPaint is an open source and free to download raster image editor aimed at users who are looking for an application that is more easily accessible than GIMP. LazPaint presents its users with a pretty clear and easily understood user interface that is similar to Paint.NET. For image editor newbies who aren't looking for an overly powerful package or to enhance their photos, LazPaint is worth looking at.
  5. IrfanView
    Once you have created your images, a very good program to run is IrfanView. If you download this progam and also download and install the plugins, you will be able to open your image in the program and then use the File > Save for Web...(Plugin) to reduce the image file size quite dramatically without noticably compromising the image quality.

General Settings

Figure 1 - General Settings
General settings

Placeholder Settings

Figure 2 - Placeholder Settings
General settings

The placeholder settings determine how each of the advert controls behave and whether or not it is in use.
The diffent properties are explained below.

Managing Adverts

Figure 2 - Editing & Adding Advert
General settings

Editing or adding an advert is essentially the same process, just click the Add Advert link above the advert table to add one or click the pencil icon to the right of the advert in the table to edit an existing one.
Figure 3 above displays what is shown.

To delete an advert, click the trash can icon to the right of the advert in the advert table.


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