{"id":319,"date":"2021-07-12T16:16:22","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T20:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/?p=319"},"modified":"2021-07-19T16:17:06","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T20:17:06","slug":"how-to-write-effective-content-for-bu-banners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/2021\/07\/12\/how-to-write-effective-content-for-bu-banners\/","title":{"rendered":"How to write effective content for BU Banners"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div style=\"position: relative; padding-bottom: 66.118421052632%;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"608\" height=\"402\" style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;\" id=\"kaltura_player\" src=\"https:\/\/cdnapisec.kaltura.com\/p\/2159741\/sp\/215974100\/embedIframeJs\/uiconf_id\/39435141\/partner_id\/2159741?iframeembed=true&amp;playerId=kaltura_player&amp;entry_id=1_8z4s6t2q&amp;flashvars[streamerType]=auto&amp;flashvars[localizationCode]=en&amp;flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true&amp;flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true&amp;flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left&amp;flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true&amp;flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true&amp;flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical&amp;flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false&amp;flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true&amp;flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder&amp;flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true&amp;flashvars[Kaltura.addCrossoriginToIframe]=true&amp;&amp;wid=1_62e7jpt4\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"webkitallowfullscreen\" mozallowfullscreen=\"mozallowfullscreen\" allow=\"autoplay *; fullscreen *; encrypted-media *\" sandbox=\"allow-forms allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-top-navigation allow-pointer-lock allow-popups allow-modals allow-orientation-lock allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-presentation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation\" frameborder=\"0\" title=\"Kaltura Player\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2>Transcript<\/h2>\n<p>Hey folks, Ashley Kolodziej here with yet another tutorial on BU Banners from Boston University Interactive Design. Today, we&#8217;re going to take a look at BU Banners and how to write effective banner copy to guide your users across the site. Let&#8217;s get started.<\/p>\n<h3>Review of last recording<\/h3>\n<p>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&#8217;re going to go over how to use those different options to create really effective banner copy that will guide users throughout the website.<\/p>\n<h3>Write a catchy title<\/h3>\n<p>Let&#8217;s pretend that on this page, we were directing people to learn more about planets. Let&#8217;s change our title here to something catchy, something action oriented, such as &#8220;What secrets do our planets hold?&#8221;.<\/p>\n<h3>Write a descriptive subtitle<\/h3>\n<p>Under the subtitle, describe to the user a little bit more about the type of information that they&#8217;ll get by following the call to action on your banner. So if our title, the thing that grabs our user&#8217;s attention, is &#8220;What secret do our planets hold?&#8221;, what could our subtitle be?<\/p>\n<p>How about something like &#8220;Go on a journey with Dr. So-and-so to discover what we&#8217;ve learned about space in the past two years&#8221;?<\/p>\n<h3>Choose content to link to<\/h3>\n<p>So here, I&#8217;ve gone ahead and written that subtitle copy. And now I&#8217;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&#8217;t have a real link, so I&#8217;m just going to put a pound sign in here. This is a good best practice if you don&#8217;t know what the link is going to be yet.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<h3>Write a brief, descriptive call to action<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s write something like discover the secrets of Mars.<\/p>\n<h3>View your changes on the page<\/h3>\n<p>Now that we&#8217;ve written some great copy for our banner, we&#8217;re going to go ahead and hit update.<\/p>\n<p>And now let&#8217;s refresh the page.<\/p>\n<p>Cool! We can see &#8220;What secrets do our planets hold? Take a journey with Dr. Sam Someone through two years of scientific findings on Mars.&#8221;, and then finally, our call to action: &#8220;Discover the secrets of Mars&#8221;.<\/p>\n<h3>Best practices for writing banner copy<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>You want to avoid phrases like &#8220;learn more&#8221; because screen readers will go through the page and they don&#8217;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&#8217;ll just say, learn more, learn more, learn more, learn more, learn more.<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t want to do that. Always write descriptive call to actions for the best accessibility for everybody.<\/p>\n<h3>Conclusion<\/h3>\n<p>So that&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Learn how to write effective, engaging titles, subtitles, and calls to action in your banner area while practicing your editing skills in BU Banners in this tutorial. We&#8217;ll cover what makes great banner copy, how to write titles, subtitles, and calls to action, and tips for accessibility from a writing perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3357,"featured_media":322,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3357"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions\/321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/bu-banners\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}