Re: 30K Banner Limits

Hey Alex,

I dunno about that jazz man. Our Clients would flip, then laugh in our face, if we came at them with a 100K+ banner. Man they get upset if its 40K.

We go the external load route with banners. So if we need some extra space see what you can split off and load later. Usually this will require a user interaction. "Click here to view my amazing banner". Then there is all sortsa leeway on this load. You can argue the user wants to see your amazing banner, so they will be willing to wait for a bit.

Tips on the 30k inital load though.. hmmmmm

Crop images if ya can. Anything you can pull off is better.

Try to stick with as few fonts as possible. One would be the best

Sometimes replacing an image with a vector can help ya out. This is tough to pull off most of the time, but worth thinking about.

Oh a neat trick that has worked for me before is replace your PNG's with JPEG's. The trick here is knowing when you can pull this off. A little jpeg compression from photoshop and then recompress in flash can keep good quality and lower the file size. The catch is the transparency.

To get around this look for images with simple transparency shapes. We had to do a baseball banner and it saved a lot of file size to use a JPEG in place of a transparent Baseball PNG. Then you wanna use a simple circle mask in flash to get your transparency back.

SO look for images you can mask the transparency out of. Can save ya in a bind.

On a side note, remember your banner will probably not be the only ad on the page. So the <30K limit is more about page weight then your banner weight. Sites can have like 3 or 4 of these things going at once, those 30K loads can start to add up. So try to concern yourself more with being the best and getting that user interaction :) Just cant put so much filesize into something the user hasn't really come to the page to see..

Sorry but as sweet ass as your banner will be, I doubt it will be driving traffic to the site :) "OH man did you see that sweet banner" doesn't come around to often!

Hope this helps man! Happy flash'n
-ross