Insider has compiled five tips for a great outdoor advertising website.  The tips come out of the time Insider spends evaluating outdoor websites in order to compile the annual Billboard Insider Outdoor Website rankings.

• Don’t overdue animations. It’s very easy to distract your viewers with clouds blowing across the screen, sliding signs, hummingbirds, automatic videos, or sliders which slide too fast. Flash makes your site load slower. Make it easy for advertisers to find your signs. That’s why they visit.

• Link your website to your facebook, linked in and twitter pages. Many outdoor advertising websites do not link to facebook, twitter or linkedin even if a company has pages.

• Be mobile-friendly. Google announced in May that there are more mobile searches than there are desktop searches. Almost half of the websites which Insider has reviewed are not mobile friendly. A desktop webpage looks tiny on a smartphone. It needs to be simplified and optimized to show well on the small screen. An up to date wordpress theme or a good web developer can solve this problem.

• Put your name and picture on your website. Insider sees lots of company websites which ask you to email or phone a disembodied ghost in the cloud. A potential advertiser should know who they are calling.

• It’s all about your signs. A map. A ride sheet. Quality pictures from several angles. Maybe even video (easy to upload to Youtube). This is why people visit. The only good reason to display sign info is to hide your signs from Landmark. I’ve seen lots of people who try to display their signs using a billboard planet map which fails to load.