Advertisement Management and Banner Rotator

The board is pre-configured with Banner Rotator. The Rotator displays random banners at the top of the board on every page with every content change.

Note: The rotator works by selecting a random number from the total number of active banner entries. If you have a small number of banners, then it is possible the same banner is displayed 2 or more times in a row. This should not alert you. The average number of each banner display is eventually equalized. 

The banners can be loaded with two methods: Automatically by a user and Manually by an administrator.

Automated Banner Submission

With this method users may submit banner by uploading an image and filling out an online form. Only registered users who created a regular user account with the board may apply for banner advertising. It is advisable to modify advertise.asp page to reflect the conditions and prices for banner submission. Since there may be a variety price schemes for banner advertisement, you have to establish it yourself. The part of the page where you will outline the price scheme, can be modified online. Logon to admin page, click on "Email Templates" and select "Advertisement" Template. Modify template or copy\paste your HTML code and click Save. The content you modified will appear at the top of the advertise.asp which can be navigated by clicking on Advertise link at the bottom navigation bar.  If you have enabled a payment system, then the pay button will automatically appear at this page. Unlike the ad post, payments for banner rotator and\or other advertisement services on your site will not be automatically posted to user accounts due to variety of price scheme and services you may offer. 

Depending of the method selected by user during submission, the banner may be displayed  for a certain period of time or until the certain number of impression are reached.

Following would happen during Automated Submissions:

• Users log on to the system and click on "Advertise" link within bottom navigation bar.

• Users upload banner image and fill all necessary information about their site.

• The banner record is automatically created with the status - "Not Active"

• Administrator gets notification Email and reply to the user about the procedure of payment.

• Once user have paid the administrator changes status of the banner to "Active" and banner displayed with rotator.

• Banner is automatically expire when duration is ended, or certain number of impressions are reached. This occur with the First Click on the banner after expiration time is up.

Administration and Manual Banner Submission

The rotator configuration page can be accessed by logging to Admin page and clicking "Banner Rotator".

With automated submission, the initial status of the banner is "Not Active". Once payment is received, you as administrator, would need activate the banner. Find the banner in the list, click Edit, make corrections if necessary, then check Activate,  Notify User and save changes. The banner is added to randomizer and notification Email is sent to user about banner activation. 

When banner is Expired, the record is not deleted but status changes back to "Not Active". At this point if user decided to continue with advertising campaign, you will need to Reset banner. While resetting, the Start Date is changed to the current date. Impressions and clicks counter is getting reset to 0 as well. You may edit the record and add the duration or number of impressions and then activate a banner over.

To delete the record completely, click delete within the list next to appropriate entry. At this point banner image is NOT deleted (only the reference to it in randomizer). The file itself appear within "Available banners" box. You may leave it alone or physically delete the file by clicking on "Delete banner Image"  button.

Note: It worth to mention, that administrator may configure banner campaign to run for certain period of time AND/OR until it reaches certain number of impressions, while the user must select between two methods when submitting request. This gives administrator more flexibility to have no limit for banner campaign at all. Very useful if you want to submit your own banner for other site or for the site of your friends for instance (See manual submission below).

To Submit Banner Manually you would need:

• Drop banners image into "banners" folder.

• Open Banner Rotator page. All available banners will be listed within left "Available Banners" box.

• Select banner by double-clicking on the file name, type Site Name, URL address which the banner should point to, Alt Text, Email of the owner, select duration period (Select forever to remove the limit) and/or number of impressions (Select No Limit to remove restrictions) and  click "Add to Rotator".

• The banner entry will be created and added to randomizer and the banner name will be moved to the right "Randomized Banners" box

Within the list you may see the cumulative statistics for actual impressions and clicks on the banner since the beginning of the campaign. The detailed (daily) statistics can be accessed by users who submitted the banner. While logged, user may go to Advertise page and click on See Rotator Statistics. All banners and sites associated with this user will be displayed. No user can see the other user statistics.

Option for advanced users

You may move rotator to the bottom of the page. Open header.asp, locate line <%= RotateBanner %> and move it into appropriate place in footer.asp page. If you would like for the banner to appear on certain pages only, then remove the above string from header.asp at all and place it anywhere you'd like within designated pages.

This version allows to quickly modify appearance of the board changing the board width and horizontal position.

The Board has also been configured to accept up to 10 pages of advertisement, news or any other content. Each side of the board can accommodate 5 pages in any format (htm, asp, php...). The pages may be stored locally in "advert" folder, or anywhere on the web, as long as they have a valid URL address. It is more convenient to store them in "advert" folder because this way they are available for selection via drop-down box on "Advertisement Management" page.
Board can also be configured to display portal side content within ALL public pages (excluding admin pages) or display portal only at main - default.asp page. In addition Left/Right portal content can be individually hidden.

Modifying Classified Board Appearance

• Navigate to "Side Bars Content & Geometry" page off the main Admin Page.
• Select the overall width of the board either by % or px. As well as the board horizontal orientation (if width is less than 100%)
• Selecting width by pixels will obviously create a fixed width for your board. This is best suite if you display classified board within a frame on your existing site.

Displaying Portal Content

By default portal displayed only at the default.asp page. To enable portal for ALL other pages check "Show Portal on All pages" box and save changes. In addition you can hide Left/Right portal sides individually by modifying "Show Left Portal Bar" and "Show Right Portal Bar" check boxes status. Combining this feature with Side Bars advertising (see bellow) you can have a variety of different appearances for your board.

Note: Portal Bars Content customized via Main Page Configuration page. To save space needed for some extensive Admin pages content, the portal is not displayed on any of the administrative pages.

Displaying content bars

Each left/right bars content page is displayed in a separate inline Frame. 5 frames on the left side bar are in header.asp and 5 frames on the right are in footer.asp. Therefore frames are visible on every page of the Classified Board. Moreover the content is refreshed each time visitors are jump from page to page on your board. This would allow you to place an add rotators to the frames content. The bars can be completely hidden by switching off "Enable" checkbox next to appropriate bar header (in "Side Bars Content & Geometry"). As well as configuring the overall width of each side bar 

To display the local page:

• Prepare your page, filled with banners, text, rotators... etc.

• Drop the page into "advert" folder.

• Navigate to "Side Bars Content & Geometry" page off the main Admin Page.

• Select your local page from the drop-down box and click "Select" button next to the input field of the appropriate content side. (Content filled from top to bottom).

• The height of the frame is automatically given 100 px. If your page is longer, adjust the value manually.

• Click on "View" button to preview your page. At this point the content only displayed on your configuration page.

• Trim the height if necessary until the page is completely visible within frame.

• Click "Save Changes" to replicate the advertisement to the entire board.

• Note: Each side frame page should have content width, which does not exceed the side bar width you have configured for left/right bar.
  
  If you have remote pages, then simply copy and paste a URL address to the page into chosen content field, click "View", adjust the height and click "Save Changes"

IMPORTANT: All HTML links within content pages must have a target specified in <a> tags. It must be either:

....  target="_blank">  for a new page, or

....  target="_top">  for the same page.

If target is not specified, then all advertisement links will be opened within the same iframe!!

The other way of advertisement, is to modify header.asp and footer.asp to display banners, rotators or any other content you wish to display for all pages on the board.

You may display top 5 new ads at the remote site in a form of scrolling ticker. This can also be displayed at your site but on pages other that classified. The "heart" of this solution is the feed.js which dynamically generated at the same time the ticker on your classified is created. This script is located in "cl_upload" folder.
 

Locate a best place to display a scrolling ticker at the destination page. This could be a table cell, a <div> or <p> layer. Then place the following code inside that layer:

Configure ticker options such as width, height, font... etc.