But has the banner had its day? Do we ever really look at them in the same way that we did when they were new and exciting? It's very much an individual point of course. Some people look at them all the time, while others no doubt gloss over them and cease to notice them at all.

If you take a look at the vast amount of web marketing efforts going on today, you will notice that a fair amount of it is banner advertising. So clearly it's not a case of banners being used less than they have been in the past. Some websites might choose to offer other types of advertising than the banner, but surely that is a personal choice made by the webmaster rather than anything else. Some people certainly have a preference for different types of advertising, and that may be determined by the amount of space they have to promote on their website or blog more than anything else.

Perhaps it is more the response to banner advertising that is making people decide whether to keep using them or to ditch them instead. But can we lay that at the door of the banner format itself - or the people who are creating them?

Quite often it is the latter that is responsible for how well a banner performs, as opposed to the fact that it is a banner. If you frequent some of the biggest and most well known websites around today, you will see that some of them have large banners somewhere on the page. But these aren't always plain static banners - they will usually be animated ones that cycle through a specific presentation. It's rather like watching a mini television advert on your computer.

So is this the way of the banner now? It seems as if it could be. After all it is known that they don't attract the attention quite as much as they used to. It seems that people might actually take more notice of online marketing methods that have some movement in them. They do catch the eye rather more than any static banner ever could.

It's obviously not the end for the banner. Just as with every other promotional tool in the past, it too has to change and develop as time moves on. The internet is always changing and so are the needs and expectations of the people who use it. The static and boring banner may well have served the purpose well a few years ago, but it will get left behind now.

If you are using banners which are past their sell by date, perhaps it's time you had another look at them. It's never too late to overhaul your advertising and make it work even better than it does now.