The “Stealth Project” I’ve been working on for a few months is now ready to un-stealth. Presenting “CellarWebAds”, an easy way to display ads on a web site.

I’d been looking for a way to put display ads (graphic images) on a web site without hard coding them, and a way to track the views and clicks for an ad. There’s some free and not-so-free solutions out there, and I tried many of them. But they just didn’t work right for me. They were too complex to run, and hard to integrate in a web site. After spending a bit of time looking at other non-solutions, I decided to write my own. Besides, I wanted to learn more about PHP and MySQL.

So, I’ve been working on CellarWebAds, and it’s ready to be foisted on the world. If you look on the right side of these pages, you’ll see a few ads at the bottom of that right column. Each time you view these pages, a different set of ads will be displayed in a different order. CellarWebAds makes it easy to add display ads to a web site. Only two simple PHP commands are placed on the web page (it even works in a WordPress widget). These commands perform complex functions on a series of database tables that specify the ad to display.

An administration program is used to add the necessary information to the database tables in order to display the ads. As each ad is displayed, a tracking counter table is incremented. And a ‘click’ on the ad increments a clicking counter. Those counters are used, along with a rate table, to create a bill for the advertiser.

I think it is a quite simple way to integrate ads on a web site. You’ll find all the details at the new CellarWebAds.com web site.

The best part of CellarWebAds is that it is free (although we will accept donations). CellarWebAds will work on any web site (even WordPress), and is quite easy to install and implement.

So, that’s the “Stealth Project” I’ve been working on the past few months. The next step is to get CellarWebAds installed on some client web sites (especially the ones that I am part-owner of). And then some nice little unobtrusive ads.

Check out CellarWebAds, and let me know what you think.