{slide=The Banner Component}The Banners component is a simple, basic, yet fairly robust advertising management extension that is part of the Joomla core/default installation. It does not allow automated ad purchasing, more than basic statistical reporting (impressions, clicks, and CPM), or user control of the ad system from the frontend, but it is easy and quick to use. To use Banners, you will need to set up clients to own the ads, categories of ads based on their size and position, and the ads themselves.

Ads must be allocated a certain number of impressions (time they appear) before expiring or have an unlimited number of impressions. There is no date tracking for banners, but there is a note field you can use as an ad management aid.

Ads can be assigned tags/keywords. This corresponds to a setting in the ad display module that, if turned on, will only display ads with tags that match other tags/keywords assigned to a page, i.e. article metadata settings.

Ads can also be designated as "sticky." If one or more banners in a category are sticky, they will take priority over banners that are not sticky. For example, if two banners in a category are sticky and a third banner is not sticky, the third banner will not display if the module setting is 'Sticky, Randomize'. Only the two sticky Banners will display.{/slide}{slide=Banner Modules}There are numerous third-party ad display modules you can install that work with Banners. The Joomla! core banner display module will randomly or sequentially display ads from one designated banner category. A keyword matching function can be turned on, if used, to match ads with relevant content.{/slide}{slide=Secondary Pages That Should Not Have Ads or Right Hand Column Modules}Generally it's not good to have ads or other modules in the sidebar columns if their vertical length routinely exceeds the vertical length of the main content area. (Likewise, the main content area's vertical length shouldn't radically exceed the vertical length of an active side column, but that doesn't look as bad as the other way around.)

While this is not an issue in the original setup for this site, be aware for future reference that under some conditions some pages (other than "Home"/the front page) should not or cannot carry any ads (or any modules) in the right hand columns. This is either because the main content areas on those pages needs to be full-width to look right, or else those pages are generated by an unusual component that doesn't play well with Joomla's menu and URL generating systems, hence per page module assignments may not work under any or many conditions for those pages. However, any module will appear on any page if it is assigned to all pages. The only exceptions are menu items that are links, like the link to the XML sitemap, which is essentially outside Joomla and outside its template. If you want to bring an external link like that into Joomla's page management and template system so it looks like other pages and can take module assignments, you need to create a menu item of the "wrapper" type and set it to point to your external link. This will "wrap" (frame) whatever is on the other end of that link within the main content area. You'll probably need to tweak height dimensions for this page on its menu item parameters. (This is how the externally hosted subscription management pages at buc-data.com are made to look like a part of this site.)

These pages can't take ads or shouldn't have ads (or any and sidebar columns) because will make the template look bad or break:

• Where to Find SAILING (The table on this page needs to be the full width of the page.)
• Web Buttons (Large square ads to the right of web buttons would look bad; other modules might be OK.)
  
• The XML site map (It's impossible to assign modules to this page.)

These pages can take ads but should not take them:

• All the Staff-only pages (Your advertisers don't want to advertise to you. This would also run up the number of ad impressions and obscure the true statistics on how many readers have seen an ad.){/slide}