What is an announcement banner?
An announcement banner is a slim, full-width bar pinned to the top or bottom of an application, used for news everyone should be able to see without being interrupted: maintenance windows, launches, policy changes. It trades the modal's force for reach — visible to all, blocking none.
What belongs on a banner
One-line news with a link: scheduled maintenance, a released feature with a "see what's new" pointer, an event or deadline. The format enforces honesty about scope — if the message needs paragraphs, it needs a modal or a changelog entry, and the banner is at most the pointer to it.
The craft that keeps it respectable
- Push, don't cover. A banner that overlaps the app's own header is self-sabotage; the push-content-down pattern moves the page instead.
- Temporary by design. Banners are news, and news expires. One at a time, unpublished promptly — a permanent banner is wallpaper with a dismiss button.
- Targeted when the news is. Maintenance concerns everyone; an API deprecation concerns API users. Segmentation keeps the blast radius honest.
- A button, not a bare link. One clear action, measurable as a click, outperforms an underlined phrase.
Banner blindness and its antidote
Users learn to unsee persistent horizontal stripes — the web trained them well. The antidote is scarcity: run banners rarely enough that one appearing is itself information. Teams that treat the banner as a standing billboard spend the channel; teams that treat it as a rare bulletin keep it working for years. Built no-code, with frequency caps enforcing the discipline.
See the concepts running live.
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