You may have noticed we recently ran a sliding banner on the Heart Internet home page promoting our iPhone/ iPad web hosting control panel. Adding this to your own site is really easy and you can literally have it live in minutes.

To create it we used the excellent jQuery plug-in called ‘Meerkat’ which can be found here https://meerkat.jarodtaylor.com/. The plug-in comes with extensive “How to…” documentation for beginners and is completely free.

You can have it appear at the bottom, top, left or right of the screen as well as set how long it stays visible and add a ‘don’t show again’ link to prevent it becoming annoying to visitors who come back to your site regularly. We are using this to make people aware of one of our product features but you could use it for:

• Displaying adverts

• Announcing a new blog post

• Announcing a promotion

• Getting people to sign up to a newsletter or RSS feed

• Anything you can think of!

To track the effectiveness simply add some Google Analytics tracking to any links within the slider and you are ready to go! Let us know if you use this plug-in and your experiences of how effective it is.