How to Use Announcements

What's an Announcement?

The Announcement app is used to update, share a statement, and act as an overall welcome to the website for a first-time user. An announcement should be short and sweet, but efficient in drawing attention to your site.

How to Create an Announcement

To create a new announcement, click the "new" button with plus symbol located top right on the page.

Content Tab

The Content section is used to customize and build your announcement, which can be as simple or as complicated as you'd like. In this section, you have the ability to add photos, links, headers, quotes, and lists, while also being able to change the font size and color.

To start, you must name your announcement with a title to distinguish between each one created, but this won't be visible to users. Next, create an announcement by typing directly into the rectangular bar. For the purpose of this article, we'll keep our example straightforward, but you are free to play with the content settings as much as you'd like.

Trigger Tab

You are now able to control your Announcements with Triggers as seen below. With Triggers, you are able to control exactly, Who?, Where?, and How often? an end-user see's an announcement. To read more about Triggers and their functionality, check out our dedicated article here.

Search Tab

Now, with Announcements you are able to make them searchable within the Simpo Plus Search Bar. In order to make the Announcement searchable, all you need to do is select the Let users find this in search results and it will be available for your users to access.

API Code and Link To Announcement

Found to the side of the Announcement builder you are provided with the API code (Application Programming Interface) and a direct link to the Announcement. These two options give you flexibility in how you want to release Announcements to your users and how they want to be accessed.

Design Drawer

On Simpo Plus Announcements you the ability to easily and quickly update the Announcement Design via the Simpo Plus Design drawer. Here, you have the ability to customize the Announcements: Size, Background, Padding, Border, and Whitespace.

Found below is a basic example of what can be created using the Design Drawer feature. Simply use the design options to customize how you want your Announcement to look and feel for your end-users.

The Preview button located top-right of your announcement on the design page shows a preview of what your announcement will look like once it has been published. Upon clicking this button, you will notice that to bring attention to your announcement, there is a sheer grey background, called "expose," displayed against the rest of your site.

Publishing an Announcement

Once you've completed creating, designing, and assigning a place for your announcement, you can either save as a draft or publish it. If you save your announcement as a draft, you can edit and preview through the main announcement page before publishing.

As a precautionary measure, if you've published your announcement, it will take 30 seconds after publishing to actually be visible on your website. Once the 30 seconds are up, you'll be able to access your announcement on your whole site, or in a specific area if you've decided to enable the audience feature.

If you would like to unpublish an announcement, click on the respective announcement to edit, then press the "unpublish" button (the same spot as the "publish" button). Once you've unpublished the announcement, it will be saved as a draft.

Have more than one announcement you'd like to share with your viewers?

You're able to publish multiple announcements that will display after one another upon page refreshment. These announcements will appear at the same time but will display through a scrollable list in the order of when they were published.

If you've linked your announcement with an survey, the announcement will be visible first, then the survey will appear once the user refreshes their page or visits a new one.

The announcement will be shown only once per user. If you've published an announcement, then deleted it sometime after, a user who originally didn't see the published announcement will never see it because it has now been unpublished.

How to Duplicate an Announcement

The "duplicate" feature gives the option to replicate an announcement and saves time instead of creating a new one from scratch. Besides unpublishing, duplicating your announcement is the only other solution for a published announcement to be edited. After duplicating, you can edit, design, and add an audience. To do this, click on the announcement, then press the Duplicate button.

How to Delete an Announcement

To remove your announcement, click on it, then press the "delete" button. Doing so, the announcement will be deleted immediately.