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Animated banners
This section gives some guidelines on creating animated gifs
for using with Banner Exchange companies.
Rules
All the different banner companies have different rules on the
types of banners they allow, most now allow animated gifs but only
up to a certain file size, here I've used the example of the Link
Exchange.
The Link Exchange rules on animated gifs are very simple,
1) No bigger than 10K in size.
2) The animation must not be longer than 7 seconds.
3) It's only allowed to loop a maximum of 4 times.
4) Plus the normal size of 468 x 60.
This gives us a few problems, first of all you've got to make sure
that the first frame in your animation, plus the last, display
something useful. If somebody has animation turned off when they view
your advert or they use a browser that doesn't support gif animations,
they're just going to see the first frame, so the first frame of the
animation should look good as a banner in its own right.
If somebody does watch the animation, it's going to loop a maximum of
four times and then stop, and it stops on the LAST frame, so the last
frame must also look good in its own right.
The last problem is the file size, it's hard enough creating a banner
that's under 10K, never mind an animated one !! Here's a couple of examples
of the sort of thing I think you should be aiming at.
This animation is 6.21K, it runs 4 times and finishes with a screen that
just says "The Link Exchange" which is fine, the start frame is the same.
If you want to grab it and load it into Gif Animator you can see how it's
done. Here's another similar example (if they stop and you want to see
them again just hit "Reload" on your browser.
Again, it starts with the same frame and finishes with the same frame, this
one is 6.14K in size. Again feel free to download it and import it into
Gif Animator to see how it's done.
Have fun !!
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