New creative options in Wave2’s AdPortal self-service advertising solution are a response to requests from customers and prospects, the company says.

UK-based Wave2 – for which Melbourne-based APS is an authorised reseller – has upgraded the product with the addition of a ‘design mode’ to allow users to interactively create or modify advertisements, facing up to the challenge of preventing them from producing “plain ugly” advertisements.

“Until now, AdPortal has always used a template/forms approach,” says sales director Andrew Nixon-Haggarty.

He says giving users a choice of designs which they then fill in with their own text delivers professional looking advertisements, but sometimes they need tools to manually adjust a layout or design one from scratch. “The challenge is to provide a simple set of tools that give the user a flexible design environment whilst still helping him to achieve a professional result.

“Given a powerful design tool – and without assistance – most users will create a rather crude or plain ugly advertisement,” he says.

In its ‘design mode’, Wave2 reckon to have solved the problem by using a grid method and a set of library components. Advertisers drag and drop object in place, with the rules engine “making everything fit properly”.

Nixon-Haggarty says the resulting advertisement will always contain consistent fonts, properly sized and positioned images, and appropriate colours. “The edges of text and other objects will always align properly, and any effects such as transparency or clipping paths get applied automatically.”