One of the most effective ways to market your brand online is through banners. Attractive, eye-catching banners don’t just play the part of getting customer attention they are also one of the most traditional-but-still-relevant methods of promoting your brand image. The easiest example of effective banner marketing is affiliate program banners. They have all the relevant information squeezed into a box sized attractive banner that’s so catchy that a significant percentage of people viewing them end up either visiting the affiliate marketer’s website or actually enrolling for it.

While using banners is one thing, designing them is an entirely different story. Actually, the way your banners perform depends to a large extent on the way they are designed. That’s probably the reason organizations really wanting to reap a significant advantage hire banner designers and marketers dedicated to the end. However, affording good banner designers is not everyone’s cup of tea.

So if you’re a professional just starting out, does that mean you have to lose out on online marketing? Of course not! With Bannerwise, you can design and use engaging banners at an affordable price and capture all the audience attention you want.

Bannerwise – Easily create beautiful banners!

Bannerwise is a tool that lets you easily design ad banners of different sizes for different devices like mobile, desktop, and laptop. Suitable for businesses of all sizes, this cloud-based tool provides users with an interactive online interface where users can either upload images and design custom banners or choose from a rich library of pre-built templates. With users across the globe raving about it, Bannerwise is well on the road to grabbing the spot of the most coveted online banner designing product.

Key advantages Bannerwise offers include:

• Allows thousands of businesses to scale-up their banner production
• Optimize their display campaigns
• Improve their workflow

Here’s a quick glance at the best features of Bannerwise:

• Enables users to create professional HMTL5 banner ads quickly and easily
• Intuitive interface means no coding skills needed
• More than 100 professional animated banner templates
• Allows you to create one design and scaled it to fit all sizes and formats automatically
• You can edit all your banners simultaneously and monitor the changes keenly
• Banners designed with the tool are compatible with most popular ad networks
• Banners are high resolution but low in size
• Professional animations in a few clicks
• Allows easy banner optimization and testing

How the tool works

Trying a tool out before putting money on the line is the smart thing to do. So start using Bannerwise through the free 14-day trial by clicking on the dark pink button that says “Get My Free Trial” on the home page; doing that will redirect you to a sign-up page where you need to fill in your details. Once done, you’ll reach a login activate page with the message “We’re very excited to have you on board!”

But this is where the story sadly took a halt. Quite surprisingly, this message was followed by another one stating that we’ll be contacted by one of Bannerwise’s display experts soon. We weren’t sure why we were rebuffed like that when the next screen we should have seen was the tool’s dashboard. One reason we could think of was that we filled in dummy details since we simply wanted to check out how the tool looked in action.

But even after trying with legitimate details the message was the same. Either the platform was under maintenance or they weren’t accepting new registrations at the time, or maybe that was just the way they operated. But it was unusual. There was nothing more we could do except wait around to be contacted.

Pricing & Licenses

Bannerwise can be used in one of 3 flavors:

• Starter plan that gives a single user access to create about 25 banners for €99 per month
• Standard plan that allows up to 2 users to create unlimited banners for €239 per month
• Professional plan that lets up to 5 users create unlimited banners for €399 per month

There are additional benefits associated with each plan with more features being available with the higher priced plans, obviously. Steep prices if you ask us, but then, if you strike the right cord with your audience through banners created using the tool, you’ll end up making much more that you spend.

• Design creative, elegant, catchy HTML5 banners within a few clicks with @BannerwiseNL bannerwise.io/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

We actually couldn’t find out any pros or cons with Bannerwise because we didn’t get a chance to use it. At the time of writing this review, we were waiting for someone from Bannerwise to contact us and take things forward. So saying anything at this point would be futile. But we promise to put up a review of the tool’s working with its pros and cons as soon as we get the chance to experience it.

The professional world would crumble without efficient emailing. A simple conversion between two people becomes official, substantial, and binding if converted into a properly drafted email. Letters of appreciation, job offers, projects contracts, designs, work documents, assignments, invoices, bills, etc. are all exchanged over email in the modern day and age. So it wouldn’t be baseless to say that, if you don’t know how to compose an appropriate email, you might find it extremely difficult to survive in a setting that uses tools like MS Office 365, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and the like on a regular basis.

Overwhelmed? You don’t need to be. Because tools like BeeFree have been developed specifically to hold your hand through the email drafting process. Check out how this simple yet brilliant tool can help you become an email pro in a few clicks.

BeeFree – Create Professional Emails Quickly

The name BeeFree actually stands for “Best Email Editor – Free” and is a part of the MailUp Group. The tool can be used as an online email editor and can also be embedded into SaaS applications. It is a drag-and-drop based email designer and builder for mobiles and hand-held devices which enables users to create mobile-responsive emails quickly and easily from anywhere.

Here are the most prominent features of the tool:

• Includes a drag-and-drop editor that lets you add individual email elements or entire rows directly from your desktop
• Emails designed with BeeFree are mobile-responsive so you don’t need to retest their look and feel on different devices
• Users get access to hundreds of elegant email templates
• The tool uses a 4-step approach:

1. Step 1: Pick an email template that suits your purpose
2. Step 2: Add your unique personalized content to the template you picked
3. Step 3: Download the message you created
4. Step 4: Use it wherever you like

That’s how simple it is! And if you find the free version of Bee interesting, you can always invest a little money and opt for more features with BeePro or BeePlugin.

Let’s see how it works

To start using BeeFree visit the tool’s homepage and click on the blue button that says “Start Designing”. This will direct you to the templates catalog from where you can choose the right email template for your purpose. There are a ton of categories to choose from including newsletters, events, e-commerce, and more. If you don’t find any template particularly interesting, you can start from scratch by using the first icon on the top-left corner (the blue colored one that says “Start from Scratch”). We tried out the tool both ways and here are the steps for each.

Start from Scratch:

• Click on “Start from Scratch” to get redirected to the editor
• From the right hand panel, select what kind of Content you wish to insert into your email design. Your choices include Text, Images, Buttons, Dividers, Social, and HTML. You can choose any combination of these elements too. Drag and drop each Content element into the left hand area of the editor.
• Click on the “Structure” tab in the right hand panel to decide and pick the layout of your emails. To apply a layout, drag and drop it into the left hand wider area.
• Click on the “Body” tab to pick from options like background color, content area color, font, link color, etc.
• Once you’ve designed everything and keyed in your email matter, you can preview what your final email will look like by clicking on the “Actions” drop down from the top menu and then selecting “Preview” option. You can view the preview for both desktop and mobile with this option.
• You can also choose to send a test email with your design to any email id you want.

At any point if you think you need guidance, simply click on the “Help” button from the right corner of the top menu. When your design is ready, click on “Save” button to download the whole message with all HTML and images to your device.

Start with a Template:

• Click on a template from the catalog to get redirected to the editor with the template opened in the left hand bigger panel
• All remaining options and settings for this kind of editing are the same as those seen in the “Start from Scratch” option
• Each template will have its own unique settings which you can alter as per your need using the given options in the right hand panel

The highs and the lows

The plus points of BeeFree include:

• Its drag-and-drop editor
• Responsive email-design capability
• There isn’t much of a learning curve attached to the tool which is good.
• Plus, it has ample reading material to supplement user’s understanding.
• And of course, the multitude of templates is an added bonus.

Coming to the negatives, there’s only one and it is actually quite expected of a free tool:

• You can’t do much beyond changing typeface, font size, color, photos, buttons etc. For any more flexibility than this you’ll have to go pro, which is kind of fair.

• Compose elegant emails quickly and easily with @beefreeio beefree.io/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

All in all, BeeFree is a nice tool. If a simple and quick email design is what you’re looking for and you don’t need any hassle, this is just what you need.

When working in an organization, brainstorming and coming up with innovative ideas is considered quite a big deal. That’s how the wizards of technology develop cool stuff for users. But as a designer or developer, thinking of something great and explaining that idea to teammates are two different tasks. It is essential that the purpose you’re trying to achieve doesn’t get lost in describing the functionality to others. And that’s precisely why so often, practical examples, or more correctly, mockups are used to demonstrate ideas.

Interested yet? If you are, we’ve got a brilliant tool for you this time that will not only help you present your ideas in an awesome way, but will also act as an online collaboration and project monitoring tool where you can share your ideas with teammates through links, accept their feedback, and apply changes accordingly. Plus, you could do a lot more. Get ready to checkout Symu!

Symu – Present Practically & Professionally

Symu is an online tool that enables you to present your projects in a browser. Projects here mean website designing projects with actual working button clicks, links, animations and targets. The tool lets you prepare dynamic presentations for your websites with features such as fixed headers, clickable hotspots, etc. Moreover, you can create dedicated folders for each of your projects in the Symu portal where you can add teammates and give them permissions and accesses to upload work collectively. It even lets you upload video files and accept feedback on them as comments.

It lets you work through a 6 step process:

• Upload your project (as an image file or a design file)
• Create clickable mockups (buttons, links, targets)
• Save the changes
• Share the project with your team via email
• Get feedback on the project in the form of comments (each comment is made into a task automatically so that it can be tracked easily)
• Work on the feedback, share again

It’s as simple as that. Additionally, the tool also lets you manage your workflow by arranging your tasks in progress, ready for review, on hold, approved through a convenient drag-and-drop feature.

Enough with the talk, let’s get some hands-on experience.

Tool Usage

To get in the action, sign up for free with the “Sign up free” button on the homepage. The tool requests for your name and email address, or you can sign up with your Facebook or Google credentials. Thereafter, you’ll be asked to activate your account by confirming that you received an email from Symu.

When your account has been activated, you’ll be directed to your Symu dashboard. You’ll see the option to upload your project. You can upload files of JPG, PNG, or PSD formats. Once the picture has been uploaded, you can begin working with it. You’ll find a “More” option on the upper right corner of the uploaded picture. Click on it to see various options like Copy URL, Share Project, Assets, Versions, Duplicate, etc. By default the image you upload will be kept in the outer-most directory level, but you can move it to any folder that you create. Check the box on the upper left corner of the image and a file menu of sorts will appear on the top of the screen with the options to Share, set project Status, Move, Duplicate, or Delete.

To edit the image, hover over the image. A button that says “View Screen” will appear in the center of the image. Click on it to open your uploaded image in full screen mode with a ton of editing options in the left hand panel. The options include:

• Versions: A look at all the different versions of the uploaded image
• Comments: Options to allow comments on the image or not. To add comments on the image, click on it anywhere. That should open up a comment dialog.
• Build mode: Click and drag over the image to select an area. As you release the mouse, a pop-up will open with options to set the destination that will open when you click on the image next. This functionality lets you set target on clicks (beneficial for button clicks).
• Desktop mode: Option to view the image as it would appear on desktop, mobile or tablet
• Upload option
• Settings: Image editing options
• Share
• Status: Option to put the image on hold, for review, mark as approved, archive

When you’re done with editing and wish to return to your dashboard, click on the Symu logo on the upper left corner of the screen. Another set of options you’ll find on your dashboard screen will be in the main menu on the top. Here you’ll find:

• Projects
• Workflow
• Tasks
• Activity
• Shared
• Teams

Pretty self-explanatory we guess!

Additional features include free templates, UI kits, etc. that you can access through the “Freebies” button on the upper right corner. To access many more of the awesome features of this tool, start your free trial and upgrade to one of the pricing plans later.

• Present your projects dynamically within your browser with @SymuCo symu.co/ via @supermonitoring

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Concluding Lines

Symu is quite a promising tool that budding designers should definitely try out. It is gradually capturing the interest of field enthusiasts and hopefully will soon rise as one of the dynamic presentation tools having the most potential.