Introduction

At is simplest, a self-managed advert can be an image or paragraph of text placed on a page on your site. Of course this would work perfectly well, but on all but the smallest of sites would quickly become unmanageable. The adverts would be hard to keep track of, and keeping the page design consistent and professional would become hard.

neatComponents provides a range of features, which used together, can help you integrate your own advertising system into your site.

Layout Elements

It makes good sense to place your adverts in a Layout Element. This provides you with control over which pages they appear on:

• You can quickly adjust the 'Surround the page with' Layout Elements setting to determine which pages the adverts appear on, or you can embed a specific Layout Element within the body of a page
• If you want to prevent adverts from showing to some users (perhaps they have paid you a fee to avoid having to see the adverts) you can use the Layout Element Permissions to prevent the Layout Element from being shown to them.
• You can control the timing of when the adverts are shown – so the adverts are shown for a few seconds before the page body is displayed.

Forms

If you have several different adverts to show, it makes sense to use a Form to store their contents in, together with a Query to format their display. This means that you can:

• Quickly change the format of all the adverts without having to work through them all.
• Use Form Permissions to allow selected staff (or even advertisers themselves) to control the content of the adverts without exposing the editing of the pages on which they appear.
• Integrate the Forms with E-commerce to allow advertising time to be purchased.
• Set a Query to display adverts at random, or based on some other criteria.