Of all the features and improvements made to SE Self-Hosted v4.9, banners would have to be one of our favorites. With banners, you can let your creativity run wild and provide a truly beautiful site experience to your users! Let’s dive into the details!
What are Banners?
Banners are widget blocks that you can place wherever you want on your site. These blocks allow you to add an image, title, subtitle, call to action button (CTA) and link. This can be a huge benefit to social networks, business sites, charities, or any other website you create with SocialEngine Self-Hosted.
What size are Banners?
This depends on where you place them. The banner shown below is approximately 1140 x 250 on a notebook screen. You’ll want to test on various screens to see how your banners look.
You’ll see below in our “Ads” section that the banner is in a side block and changes size to fit that block.
Ok, Gimme the goods! I want to know how to use these!!
There are so many uses for banners that we can’t cover every possibility, but we want to give you a couple of ideas. You can use them to fill in empty space if pages are looking a little bland. You can use them to draw attention to specific parts of your site or link to other sites you’d like to promote. You can even use them to decorate, sell ad spots, or promote causes that interest you. The potential uses for this feature are only limited by your own imagination as these banners are so versatile.
Let’s look at a couple of specific ideas we think are pretty cool.
Ads
In the next image, we made a banner into an ad spot. The link in the lower right of the banner links to the Paypal payment page we got from our Paypal account. You can link it to any payment gateway you want to use if it gives you a purchase link. This would be manual ads but it can allow you to take whatever payment method you want.
Here’s how we set it up:
Easy peasy right? Notice we left the image blank. You can choose an image or leave it blank. For something with a lot of text, it’s easier to read with no image or a very simple one.
Promoting Causes
Similar to ad spots, you can set up a banner to promote your favorite causes. This could also have a “donate” button that allows people to donate to that cause.
The above shows the March of Dimes charity and a CTA button linking to their donation page.
Promoting Members
Perhaps you want to feature some members in a banner. We used the free Gimp program to make this banner:
When we placed it, we only added the banner heading and left the sub-heading blank. We also didn’t choose a CTA for this as we wanted the images to show better.
Want more details about setting up and using banners? We’ve got a great tutorial to give you the full details on Banners.
These are just a few of the ways you can really make your site pop with banners. We would love to hear how you are going wild with banners! Drop us a line at our community to let us know.
