Featured promos display in the rotating carousel on the top of your county site's home page. The carousel will display a maximum of five featured promos. If your site has less than five, the remaining spots are filled with promos from the main Nebraska Extension website.
Featured promo images automatically resize and crop to fit the width of a browser or mobile device. As a result, the outer edges of the image can sometimes display cut off. It's best to use images where it doesn't matter if the entire image can be viewed. For example, photos of fields, buildings, or large objects usually work better than photos of people and images with embedded text.
TIP
If using a photo of people, select one with ample space above their heads and on the sides so that there's less chance they'll be cut off as the width of the screen changes. You can drag the lower right corner of your browser window to the left and right to test how your image may look at different browser widths.
Why should you create a featured promo?
Featured promos are a way to make an event, news or a timely piece of information more prominent on your site. The newest promo will display first in the rotating carousel.
What would make a good featured promo?
- Local program events (examples: 4-H events, conferences, workshops and field days)
- News (examples: horticulture updates, farm rates, crop news and beef news)
- Top visited pages or sections on your site (examples: fair results, the fair book and 4-H registration)
Featured promo images
- Use images that are approximately 1200px - 1600px wide (Do not scale an image up. If it's too small, find a larger image to use.)
- Avoid using images with embedded text on them (Screen readers and search engines can't read embedded text. Plus, the text may look cut off at different screen sizes and it may overlap the featured promo text, making it harder to read.)
- png, gif, jpg and jpeg formats are allowed but most images will work best when saved as a .jpg
- When using Photoshop optimize your images with a compression quality setting no higher than 60
- Use images that work well as a background image, so that the featured promo overlay text is readable
- Check the box to display the text on the right if the text overlay is covering up an important part of the image or it's not as readable on the left
###
Site Bytes is a regular column in Nebraska Extension – Keeping UP that provides quick tips for enhancing your county website. Written by Anne Holz, IANR Media web strategist.