Adding a Notification or Alert Bar

Many of our sites have an Alert feature included, however, some do not. This article will showcase how to add a notification (notice) bar, which is also known as an alert, to your site. Please Note: This is meant to be a temporary solution to provided notice about COVID-19 and school/business closures. If you wish to use an alert moving forward and retain the functionality please let us know, NSM offers an alert system that will work with your site's custom theme.

Notices can help present pertinent information related to closings, inclement weather, and more recently information regarding COVID-19 (Corona Virus) in a prominent manner.

The two we are recommending that are easy to implement and customize are:

• Notification Bar
• Notice Bar

There are some alternatives available which include popups and overlay notices. This is not a complete list of plugins available but rather a reviewed set of plugins by the author of the article. If you find an alternative plugin from Wordpress.org please submit a support ticket and we can install the plugin of your choosing. Please make sure to test any plugin you wish to install for compatibility with mobile devices, the notice needs to show on the normal and mobile (responsive) version of your site.

Please provide the following:

1. The notification message. *Please keep this short "Our COVID-19 Information" or "COVID-19 Information" or similar.
2. If you've created a custom page to show more information for the message,  please provide the page link (URL) to the page so we can link to it.

For many sites, this process will be straightforward, meaning you may install a notice plugin of your choice, enter in the desired message, and enable the display of the notice. For other sites with unique custom themes, some CSS adjustments may be required.  Any edits will be done on a best-effort basis meaning that support for all the changes required is out of scope.  We will attempt to make the plugin work with your theme.