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KB User's Guide - Settings Tab - Banner Alerts

This document will review how a user with access to the Settings tab may create a temporary banner that displays on all pages of their internal and/or external site.

What is a banner alert?

A banner alert is a highlighted section of content that will appear on your internal and/or external live site below your site header and above the main content area. This banner will be visible on all pages of your site (e.g. homepage, search pages, and document pages).

Banners are intended as a way to temporarily display important information to your site visitors. For example, they are useful to communication information like important deadlines, changes to hours, and service outages.

The banner will be part of the site header and will come after any navigation menus that have been added to the site header. For UW-Madison sites, the banner will have a gray background and thick red border. An example of banner content is shown which reads "Please be aware that our department's help desk will have reduced hours for the upcoming holiday. Instead of our typical hours of 9am-5pm, our phone line will be staffed from 10am-3pm. We will resume normal hours next week."

Creating a banner alert

  1. In the KB Admin Tools, go to the Settings tab, then click the Banner Alerts link in the side navigation.

  2. On this page, you will find two separate fields for your internal site and your external site. In the text field that corresponds to the site where you would like to display a banner, enter the content you would like to display. This can be entered as plain text, or it can be formatted with HTML.

    TipLightbulb symbol

    If you want to format your banner content but aren't sure how to write HTML, open the new document creation screen and use the body editor to format the text, then select the Source code < > button in the editor toolbar to view and copy the corresponding HTML.

    Under the heading "External Site Banner Alert" and "Internal Site Banner Alert", you will find a text field. There will also be a timestamp field labeled "Activation" followed by a "Pick Activation Time" link, as well as an "Expiration" timestamp field followed by links for "Pick Expiration Time", "Expire Now", and "Never Expire".

  3. In the Activation field, choose the date and time when you would like the banner to become visible on your site.

  4. In the Expiration field, choose the date and time when you would like the banner to disappear. You can use the Expire now link to easily set the timestamp to the current date and time, or the Never link to set the timestamp to one that will prevent expiration (we use the date 3000-01-01).

  5. Click Update to save your changes.

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