Specifications

Considering your audience 67
Considering your audience
When you create a site, you often need to follow certain guidelines for
submitting a Flash banner. For the purposes of this article, following
established advertising guidelines is not a great concern because you're not
submitting the banner to a company for advertising purposes. This section
briefly explores some of the considerations you might have when creating a
banner in a real-life project, or a project for wide distribution. When you
create a banner that you submit to an advertising company, often you need
to make sure the file meets their specified file size, dimension, target Flash
Player version, and frame-rate guidelines. Sometimes, you have to consider
other rules about the kinds of media you can use, button code you use in
the FLA file, and so forth.
You have created the banner and resized its dimensions. When doing so,
you actually set the banner to established and standardized dimensions for
what the Interactive Advertising Bureau calls a "wide skyscraper." The file
size is also reasonable for a Flash ad of this size. You will discover how to
reduce the file size in an upcoming exercise. For information on standard
advertising dimensions (and many other useful guidelines), check out the
Interactive Advertising Bureau's Standards and Guidelines page here:
www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp. However, ensure you confirm the
advertising guidelines for the advertising service, client, or website that
you're advertising with first. Guidelines might include standards for file
size, dimensions, sound and video usage, and buttons.