300x250 Banner Templates from Viewst

Overview

There are many different banner types that are available right now, each with their own purpose and effectiveness. Some of them were created at the very beginning of the age of the Internet, and others are barely a few years old. This time, we’ll go over one of the most popular banner types out there – 300x250.

300x250 is one of the standard units of Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB, it is an online advertising-focused trade body), it is often placed above the fold and works well in tandem with a 300x600 ad unit in a multi-sized ad slot. It has several names to it – it is often called MPU in the UK, and MREC (Med Rec, or Medium Rectangle) is the common name for 300x250 format in the US.

While the abbreviature that is MREC has already been explained, there are multiple ways to approach the explanation of the MPU name. So far there have been three commonly known definitions of this abbreviature:

• Message Plus Unit. The rarest one out of the three, this explanation describes MPU as something that is capable of delivering a message and something else, too. The base idea is still referring to the overall effectiveness of this banner type, with higher efficiency and less cost efficiency than most of their counterparts.

• Multi-Purpose Unit. While slightly more popular than the first explanation, it is far from being the most popular one. At the same time, it is likely that this describes MPU in the most accurate way possible, implying that MPUs are often used as a baseline for a lot of newer advertisement units that are launched. One relatively popular example of that process are Video MPUs, which are just plain old MPUs with videos inside of them instead of images. There seems to be no real reason to pay extra for Video MPUs over regular MPUs, although some people still tend to do it from time to time. The same goes for many Overlay types of ads, since those are often created as the modification of plain old MPUs.

• Mid Page Unit. In some cases also called as Mid Position Unit, this explanation derives from the fact that MPUs are often used in the middle of longer articles, breaking them into several short ones. Such an addition drastically increased the effectiveness and value of less longer pages when compared with more shorter pages.

300x250 banner templates

As we’ve mentioned before, 300x250 might be the most effective ad unit available right now, and thus it is appropriately expensive. It is spread all over the internet and often used multiple times on the same page. While you can more or less easily embed videos instead of images into your 300x250 banner borders, it’s important to remember that you have to know beforehand the placement of your ad on the page, since if there are several different ads on the same page, their effectiveness would drop drastically the lower they are on the page.

Since the regular explanations could only go so far, it’s always helpful to list some examples for such a topic. Below you’ll see a set of templates for 300x250 banner ads. 

300x250 template example #1

300x250 template example #2

300x250 template example #3

You can find all of these templates, and templates of other sizes, within Viewst’s online platform that offers ad building capabilities, as well as many other supplementary features.

Viewst as a free 300x250 banner creator

Ads production is the main purpose of Viewst, and it does an extremely good job doing that. There are plenty of different features included in the package, such as image resizing, cropping, animating, adding text, objects, effects, and more.

Below you’ll see an example of Viewst’s interface, showing some of the features that we’ve listed above.

Viewst interface

You can see that the interface itself is user-friendly and should not be a problem for most of the people, even without any technical background. It’s easy to use Viewst for your ad building purposes, no matter how skilled you are. We’ll go over an example of that below.

Building a unique banner using Viewst

Due to the nature of this post, we’ll be explaining the process of creating a 300x250 ad banner with Viewst’s online ads builder:

1. After signing in or registering, all you have to do to begin is to click one of the “Get started” buttons at the Viewst landing page. That way you’ll arrive at the “My projects” page.

2. Project management is mainly performed within the “My projects” page, since a lot of project-related features are placed there, such as project sorting, project creation and other project management-related tasks. Choose either one of your existing projects or the “New project” button to continue.

   1. Additional steps need to be performed if you’re creating an entirely new project. For once, you have to choose the dimensions of your future project/advertisement, and there are many different ad types that Viewst provides dimensions of. At the same time, the option to input both the height and the width manually is also included.

   2. After choosing the 300x250 banner ad format (as per our example), you’ll be able to see the next page that leaves you with the ability to choose a template for your future ad. You’re free to start from scratch with a blank background, but Viewst also offers many different templates that you might be interested in or to draw inspiration from.

3. As soon as you’ve confirmed the preferred template, you’re free to change your future banner in any way you like, by either resizing it, applying effects, adding text boxes and objects, and so on. Additionally, you might have seen something unusual at the screenshot of the interface above. Here’s how it works – you don’t have to manually crop each of the objects or images before adding them to the banner, since Viewst is capable of automatically cropping everything that’s not within the borders of your banner preset.

4. An essential part of the entire process is saving the results of your efforts. You’ll have to click the “Download” button to initiate that process. There are several different options available for you at that page: saving your project within Viewst to be able to come back to it later and/or modify it as a collection of elements and not as a one-piece image, or exporting your banner in one of the offered formats, such as PNG, GIF, MP4 or even HTML-5 archive (for coding purposes). It’s also possible to get a direct link to your banner hosted within Viewst after downloading the banner at least once, as a nice bonus.

Conclusion

Viewst offers a comprehensive online tool for creating advertising materials for different intents and purposes. A plethora of features and functions allows for a lot of versatility and creativity in the creation process, with features ranging from something simple – like resizing, cropping or adding text boxes – to somewhat more complex tools, like animation capabilities among other ones.

The ability to work with many different banner types, along with all the other advantages above, makes Viewst a likeable choice when it comes to online ad builders on the market.