NexAds offers forums, websites and blogs the availability to get their name and links in front of thousands that they might have otherwise never had the opportunity to do so.

Member sites of NexAds have fantastic control of what text and colors are used within their NexAds Control Panel.  However, often a member may not fully understand how to create an effective advertisement.  Choosing the right ad styles can mean the difference between ads your users will notice -- and click -- and ads they'll skip right over.

Colors

For most color techniques, we recommend using colors for your ad text and links that already exist on your site. For example, if the links on your site are all green and your text is black, use green links and black text in your ads as well. Since most users are accustomed to seeing blue links, you might also try using blue. In general, use common sense when choosing your ad styles. If your site's main colors are pastels, don't design ads that are all primary colors. Users won't click on ads that are visually offensive.

Tip for making your ads visible: open your page and give it a quick glance, putting yourself in the mindset of a regular user. Do the ads draw your attention, without being garish? Would you be likely to notice and read them, or do your eyes glide right past them? Try to find a balance between ads that overwhelm your content and ads that your users won't even see.

Content

Sometimes NexAds members want to convey effectively exactly what their site has to offer the end-user.  Often, in doing this, the member doesn't take into consideration on how their ad will look when displayed in an ad unit and the text becomes rather large in amount of words (length).  It is recommended that you limit the length of your site description to no more than 150 characters.  Using too many words can actually hurt you because the text will overflow the space available on the ad!

Here are three different ads, let's compare the number of characters of each one and how they appear:


133 characters


190 characters


217 characters

The first ad image is using 133 characters in their ad text.  This looks pretty good but a few more characters wouldn't hurt to remove some of the white space.

The second image is using 190 characters in their ad text.  This looks really good but realize that this same text will also be displayed on different ad units, some as small as 125x125 buttons.  That might be a tad too much text for such a small ad!

The third image is using 217 characters in their text.  This is really too much.  The text pushes the sites link completely off the ad itself.  Sure it conveys the message they want, but they've lost their link being presented to the viewer.

None of the above images are right or wrong and it all matters to you, the member, to design how you want your ad to look to viewers.

Finally, on this point, too little text is even a worse situation, especially on larger ad units.  Excessive amounts of background color will presented to the viewer.  If you have a site with a lot of text in paragraphs, this might not be a bad thing since it will draw the readers eye, but on everyday sites, it's not a good practice.

I hope this helps you in designing your sites NexAds ad.  Remember, you can always look at how ads are presented by viewing the NexAds Ad Codes page.

Note: Comments concerning the ad examples above are in no way a reflection of how I feel toward any of the sites, or their owners.  The ad units themselves, solely, were the target of the comments