People are overwhelmed with information daily. When your business has important content that needs to be quickly put out to your audience, how do you present it in a way to guarantee your users will notice? One fix is to use website alert banners.

Alert banners are referred to by various names—such as notification bars, announcement banners, and sticky bars—but these terms all refer to the same thing: any prominent alert on a web page designed to capture user attention.

Having an effective website alert system in place is crucial if you run a website. If you wait until you need a way to communicate pressing information to your users to create this functionality, you might find yourself scrambling to find the right solution under pressure. Using an existing element on your website is not typically the best approach because you want something that stands apart from other content.

Read on to find out more about the different types of content for which you might use an alert banner, learn best practices for their design and implementation, and check out real-life examples.

People form their first impression of your website in about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds). Not even a whole “one-Mississippi” and a user has already determined if they will stay or leave. So what’s a make-it-or-break-it element for grabbing your user’s attention? Professional, optimized website photos.

According to the HTTP Archive’s State of the Web report, images make up more than half of a page’s weight on average. However, when appropriately optimized, pictures don’t have to take a significant toll on your site’s load time.

Don’t worry. You don’t have to be a professional or a Photoshop wiz to make your images both polished and optimized. Keep reading to learn more about what you need to know when selecting and editing images for your site.