To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max Banners system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/maxbanners/index.php

where www.yourwebsite.com is your website address.

When you arrive at the page, you will see a website form that asks for a Userid and a Password. It is necessary to enter the Userid and a Password in order to continue. These are essential because only you should have the ability to add, edit and/or delete banners from your website. If no password was required, anyone could come here and wreak havoc on your banners.

You will also find this statement:

"Important Note: It is essential that you do NOT use the BACK button on your browser in the following pages. If you do, you will probably see a message that says "Warning: Page has Expired." This will not happen as long as you use the buttons provided. Thus, there's really no need to use the BACK button. "

Hopefully, that is self-explanatory. All the buttons you need are included on the system pages. Please do NOT use the BACK (or FORWARD) buttons on your browser. This caveat is necessary because the system can lose data unless you use the navigation buttons provided on the Max Banners pages.

(Technical note: Actually, it won’t lose data, but it can appear that way because of warning messages that may appear if you use the BACK button on your browser.)

Viewing Your Banners

After entering your userid and password, you come to the "Banners Control Panel" of the Max Banners system. This is the main operating page. The first time you come here, you’ll want to use the Add a New Banner button. So let’s not look at the other elements of this page just yet. Just hit the Add a New Banner button.

When you do, you’ll see a page where you can define a banner that you will be working with. This is the page where you upload a banner image and assign it a link and a name. The page says:

Use either JPG, JPEG, PNG or GIF. Images must fit within a maximum file size of XXX bytes. To upload a new banner image, first enter a short description of the banner. (This will only appear on the Banner Control Panel.)

Next, define the URL (web address) which is the link on the banner image. Next, define an HTML template to be used to display the image. Lastly, press the Browse button to locate the image on your computer. Then hit the Upload button.

The idea is that you will be displaying banners on your webpages. When visitors click on the banner, they will go to the URL associated with the banner. (The Banner Description is only used within Max Banners on the Banners Control Panel; it is not shown on your actual web pages.)

The HTML template is how the banner is displayed.  Note that the banner template field is already displaying a template.  This is the default template from the Configuration. Let's look at how we use this.  The example is:

<p><a href="[[BANNERURL]]" target="blank">[[BANNERIMAGE]]</a><br />Text under the banner</p>

This means that the banner URL you enter into the Banner URL (link) field will be inserted wherever [[BANNERURL]] appears.  (It may appear more than once...)  Similarly, the image you will be uploading here, will appear wherever it says: [[BANNERIMAGE]]. If you want some text to appear under the image, you replace the words, "Text under the banner"   Of course, you can define whatever HTML code you like and put [[BANNERURL]] and [[BANNERIMAGE]], wherever you like.

And that’s it. Now just hit the Browse button to find the image on your computer. Then press Upload. You next see a screen which shows you the image you selected and says, "Successful upload of banner image!" Then press Back to Banner Control Panel

Banners You've Added

At this point, you go back to the Banners Control Panel. And what do you see? You see your new banner displayed. Only one is there, if this is the first banner you’ve entered, but there will be more, if you add more banners.

Let’s look at this:

It shows you the Banner Name and Banner Image. The URL you entered appears below the banner. When you click on the word Modify on the same line as the Banner Image, it takes you to a screen that looks just like the Add Bannner screen. Here’s where you can make changes to the banner, if you need to. You can also choose to Remove the banner completely, if you wish. You would put a check mark in the Remove column, and then click the Delete Checked Banners button at the bottom of the list.

The Banner Name column shows you the name you assigned to the banner.  This is the only place the Banner Name is used. Note that word Banner Name at the very top of the list in the colored row can be clicked on. If you do so, it will show you the list sorted by Banner Name.

OK.  Now that we've defined a banner (or banners,) what can we do with them? That's what the button labeled Setup Web Pages is all about...