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.
Thanks for posting this – I tend not to look into these things that much, unless a customer asks me to.
I saw yours before, and quite liked the idea but just haven’t had the time to explore the further possibilities.
I think we’ll be implementing one of these ourselves in the not-too-distant future.
Thanks again!
James,
We had a lot of success with ours. To avoid ‘banner blindness’ creeping in we are going to use it sparingly but we will definitely be using it again in the future.
Matt
Matt
It would be interesting to know what sort of success rate you had, As I find these splash pages so annoying and move away from a site ASAP…. do you know if this also works with joomla?
Davide
I tend to agree with other people posting. i have to admit that the first time I see something clinging to the bottom or side of the screen, my first question is ‘how can I get rid of it?’
This is a good tool, which you could use in various forms, for promotions, offers, or if you want to advertise something.
I would say it would get annoying if was on your site all the time, but for a short period of time would be fine.