New Architect > Archives > 2000 > 06 > Programming Product Review

Banners in the Works

By Brian Wilson

There are some very fancy programs out there to display and rotate advertisements on Web sites. You can run commercial packages on your own dedicated server, or contract with a third party to handle it all for you. The commercial solutions often carry big price tags, however. If you have a mid- to small-size budget, or a low-traffic site, there are a number of good free and shareware alternatives.

Two of them, Show & Sell and Cliff's Banner Rotater (sic) are content rotation systems. The third, BannerPlus, is a banner exchange system. More on the differences in a bit.

The CGI Resource Index offers indexed collections of scripts, organized into categories. The URL for the section of the site I explored is cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/Advertisements.

Show & Sell Version 1.07 www.geocities.com/purelybymagic Free, but copyrighted; includes both CGI and SSI versions. BannerPlus Version 0.91b www.gadnet.com/bplus Downloadable version is free; an upgraded "pro" version is available for $75. Cliff's Banner Rotater Version 2.51