Announcement bar
A strip across the top of every page, carrying one sentence.
What it is for
A bar is the only widget that never covers anything. It sits above your page and pushes the rest down, so a visitor reads it without having to close it first. That makes it the right shape for something everyone needs to know and nobody needs to act on: a delivery cut-off, a price change, a holiday closure, planned downtime.
Where it belongs
At the top of every page, from the one line you paste. Most people show it straight away and leave it until it is dismissed, so somebody who has already read it is not told again on the next page. If it only matters to people who are paying attention, it can wait for a scroll instead.
When not to use one
Not for two messages. A bar carrying two sentences is a bar nobody finishes, and if you have two announcements the one with a deadline is the one to run. Not for anything needing a reply, either: there is room for a line of text and a button, and a form in a forty-pixel strip is a form nobody completes. An email signup widget is the shape for that.
Questions
- Does it push my page down, or sit over it?
- It pushes the page down. Nothing of yours is covered, which is why a bar can carry a message a visitor did not ask for without being in the way.
- Can visitors close it?
- Yes, and it stays closed. The dismissal is remembered in the visitor's own browser — there is no cookie, and no record of them on our side.
- Will it slow my site down?
- The file your page loads is 17.4 KB gzipped and loads in the background. If Kestero were unreachable, your page would render exactly as it does now.
- Do I have to touch my site again to change the words?
- No. The line you paste points at your widget rather than carrying it, so editing the text or the colours takes effect without another deploy.