I started MyBannerMaker way back in 2005, as a bit of an accident. Back then it was called Myspace Banners, since that’s what everybody was using it for. Somewhere along the lines, though, I lost sight of the fundamentals of what the website started as.

It was fueled and driven by user-input back then. Users would ask for something…I’d see if it was possible and try to implement it as best as possible. We had free accounts for everybody that stored the saved banners (no editing them, though), a bunch of background images for you to choose from, a simple color picker, and handful of fonts. You had to sign up for an account to save a banner because ImageShack hadn’t started serving up the banners and we weren’t able to provide the infrastructure to host them properly. Eventually, though, ImageShack came into the picture and we ditched accounts since they forced users to sign up to get the code, which wasn’t something we liked.

Between then and now, the site has had more updates and changes than I can even track. Banner previews started being automatically updated (you used to have to click a button to update it), only the banner updated instead of the whole page, a full-on HSV color picker was added in, we started allowing you to upload your own images, we started allowing you to crop your photos (we used to just use the middle of the image), we added in a fourth line of text, a bunch of controls to position the fonts (used to be fixed to the left, right, or center with no vertical controls), setup text rotation (albeit pretty sloppily), added over 30 fonts, added in all sorts of image processing effects, put together lots of types of code instead of just plain code that goes where you put it, put together a FAQ with a slick search, created a rotating-banner tool (VIPs only), and started offering to store banner settings in a way that they could be edited again later. The changes have been immense, far-reaching, and path-altering.

Unfortunately, things haven’t fallen into place exactly how they should have. The code that runs the site is bloated and buggy due to constant extending and adding of new features, and the design itself restricts a lot of the options for new features and usability. Being a user-interface guru, mybannermaker drives me absolutely nuts. It could be done so much better, and there is so much potential still left in it that hasn’t been harnessed. Cutting to the chase here…

I am hereby committing to make MyBannerMaker into what it deserves to be. I have already started working on redesigns, user-interface models, and digesting site statistics to figure out what MyBannerMaker can become. I need your help, though.  Our economy is in a rather lackluster state at the moment, and because of it, the revenue coming from ads that has supported the site for the past 4 years is at 1/10th what it used to be. I don’t have a magic money tree, and people don’t send me care packages so that I can eat and keep warm. In order to have the time to spend on MyBannerMaker, I need to be able to pay hosting bills, and my personal bills too.

What I’m asking from you is this:

If you like the idea of having a free banner making tool online that gives you the freedom to create banners exactly how you like them and not how someone else styled them, and you have the ability, please consider signing up for a VIP account ($25) or making a donation via PayPal. While it might not make sense at first to pay for something that you think should be free, by doing so you enable me a chance to get the website up to speed and to where it can survive the economic downturn and remain in existence. Thanks in advance for reading this far, regardless of whether or not you are able to pitch in and help.

For the record, I do have a list of features that have been requested, and I have even more that are things that I think people will really appreciate that haven’t been requested. If you have any feedback, let me know and I’d be happy to add it to the list. Hopefully I can get some sort of feature request/voting system going on so that everybody can participate in and see where we’re going with the site and we can re-focus on user-input as the driving force behind the website.

Corey