Many organizations will want to place specialized advertisements or other messages on their web-site.
Advertisements of this type often appear on the side panels of web-sites on the right or left side of the page. They may also appear as banner ads at the top or the bottom of individual web-pages.
NeatClubs makes it easy to setup these kind of custom ads on your own site. The simple built-in custom ads facility supports up to six ads on the right or left hand side of the page. Additional ads may be placed if needed using different approaches described below. Ads may be static or animated, text or graphics and may appear on the right or left hand side of the page.
Handling Ads with referral counters
Some on-line merchants offer associate programs for web-site managers who may be willing to place advertisements for their sites.
As one of many examples, gymsupply.com has a referral program where gym owners receive credits for “click-throughs” from their web-site that result in business being generated for this vendor. As a part of their referral or affiliate programs, these merchants will normally offer links that look something like the following:
They will have a logo available for download as well as some HTML that they expect a web-master to embed into their web-site. Usually there are codes embedded in the HTML so that the vendor can tell who the referral is coming from and what ad was clicked on. The meaningful part of the reference to the merchant is what follows the “href=” string in the above example. This is the hypertext reference (usually embedded in double quotes). When someone clicks on the add for DGS / www.gymsupply.com, the vendor wants your website to redirect the browser to the URL.
Their web-site can tell the referral came from you by means of your associate ID. (in the example below we are using graphical button #14 and we are associate #270)
http://www.gymsupply.com/AffiliateWiz/aw.aspx?B=14&A=270&Task=Click
You may require assistance to do this, but reasonably technical users can often get these ads with referral counters configured themselves by following the steps below.
| 1. | Save the graphical ad from the merchant web-site by right-clicking on the image and saving it to your local computer. |
| 2. | From your NeatClubs web-site, use the “Upload a Photo” option of the image library to upload this graphic. Give it a name and ensure that it is in the system category “Side Panel Graphics”. |
| 3. | Next, select “System Setup” / "Side Panel Ads" following the procedure describe above to setup a graphical ad with the vendor logo. |
| 4. | The URL to jump to in the NeatClubs ad setup should be identical to the hyper-text reference provided by the merchant. In this example: |
http://www.gymsupply.com/AffiliateWiz/aw.aspx?B=14&A=270&Task=Click
Other techniques for placing additional Ads on your site
You may want to use one of these alternate approaches for incorporating vendor supplied ads with custom HTML code into your site:
Embedding Ads directly in Web Content
Simply paste the HTML into the HTML tab of any document that you are editing using the built in editor in the document library. By pasting the vendor supplied HTML fragment directly into your web-site, you can see a seamless advertisement effect like the one below:
The HTML that makes up this embedded ad is shown below. We have highlighted the text that comprises the inserted ad so that the interested reader can understand how the ad was inserted. Usually, inserting these ads is just a matter of cutting and pasting the vendor supplied HTML fragment into the web-page.
<img src="/uploads/splash_page3.png" alt=""><br>
<div align="center"><a title="" target="_top" href="http://www.gymsupply.com/AffiliateWiz/aw.aspx?B=5&A=270&Task=Click">
<img width="468" height="60" border="0" src="http://www.gymsupply.com/AffiliateWiz/aw.aspx?B=5&A=270&Task=Get" alt="Gymsupply.com"></a></div>
<hr><span style="font-size: 11pt"><span class="RegularParagraphLarge">We are very excited to offer a wonderful program for Carpe Diem’s students
to help build their physical fitness program. AWTC is committed to ensuring a quality gymnastics/fitness focused program for Carpe Diem’s students
with personal attention and great healthy results.</span></span>
…
Using the Photo Gallery to place Ads
While not intended for this purpose, a scrolling photo gallery can also be used as a way to present multiple ads on a web-site. An example is shown below. A photo gallery is set to display on the side panel. We've defined a collection of photos called "Customer Logos", and formatted each to be a reasonable size to display in the side panel area.
For images that have a Target URL specified in the photo properites, clicking on the side panel graphic will automatically take you to the target URL (in this example our customer web-site). The same technique can be used as well with slide show graphics that appear on the home page. These graphics become "clickable" so that someone can navigate easily to a target URL.
