How to write effective content for BU Banners

Transcript

Hey folks, Ashley Kolodziej here with yet another tutorial on BU Banners from Boston University Interactive Design. Today, we’re going to take a look at BU Banners and how to write effective banner copy to guide your users across the site. Let’s get started.

Review of last recording

Now in our last recording, we learned how to set up a private page, as well as what options you can edit in a private page to test out BU banners. In this recording, we’re going to go over how to use those different options to create really effective banner copy that will guide users throughout the website.

Write a catchy title

Let’s pretend that on this page, we were directing people to learn more about planets. Let’s change our title here to something catchy, something action oriented, such as “What secrets do our planets hold?”.

Write a descriptive subtitle

Under the subtitle, describe to the user a little bit more about the type of information that they’ll get by following the call to action on your banner. So if our title, the thing that grabs our user’s attention, is “What secret do our planets hold?”, what could our subtitle be?

How about something like “Go on a journey with Dr. So-and-so to discover what we’ve learned about space in the past two years”?

Choose content to link to

So here, I’ve gone ahead and written that subtitle copy. And now I’m going to choose content to link to. You can either choose a link within your site or an outside link to point to. For now, I don’t have a real link, so I’m just going to put a pound sign in here. This is a good best practice if you don’t know what the link is going to be yet.

If you do know what the link is, you can go to add or choose link and choose one of these links here to automatically populate that area.

Write a brief, descriptive call to action

And then finally, your call to action should be a very quick couple words summary on what action the user will take to get to that information you just described in the subtitle.

So let’s write something like discover the secrets of Mars.

View your changes on the page

Now that we’ve written some great copy for our banner, we’re going to go ahead and hit update.

And now let’s refresh the page.

Cool! We can see “What secrets do our planets hold? Take a journey with Dr. Sam Someone through two years of scientific findings on Mars.”, and then finally, our call to action: “Discover the secrets of Mars”.

Best practices for writing banner copy

What makes this a really successful set of banner copy? It has a catchy title, a description of what exactly the user will get by following this call to action, and then a final clear call to action that is specific to this information.

You want to avoid phrases like “learn more” because screen readers will go through the page and they don’t always read buttons in the same order that you place them on the page. So sometimes a screen reader will read through a page and it’ll just say, learn more, learn more, learn more, learn more, learn more.

You don’t want to do that. Always write descriptive call to actions for the best accessibility for everybody.

Conclusion

So that’s how you write great content for BU banners and how you can change the title, subtitle, and call to action to direct your users across your website. Next, we’re going to take a look at how to edit the banner image really effectively and how to select banner images that will help your banners work the absolute best that they can. I will see you in just a moment.