As you might have noticed already, we have added a bar to our website pages that invites you to share with your networks. The function comes courtesy of ShareThis. While change is not always comfortable, we think this social media plugin strikes a good balance between obtrusiveness and invisibility, where the former can be alienating and the latter is useless to everyone.
The bar appears when you scroll down on a page. Several common social media sites (including a send-by-email option) are visible at first and several dozen more are available by clicking the green button on the right with the “share” symbol. By all means, have at it! If, on the other hand, you would like the bar to go away, you can click on the small “x” all the way to the right — see the image below to get the general idea.
This is a good way for us to better understand how people find out about us through digital word of mouth and it is a great way to encourage even casual visitors to become ambassadors of our community.
Let us know what you think — yea or nay — and what ideas you have to help us tell our collective stories.
It might be useful to have a mouse-tip label to identify the options for those of us who aren’t familiar with all the networks. I didn’t recognise the Reddit logo until I clicked on it and certainly wouldn’t have guessed that the green button gave access to other networks if it hadn’t been mentioned here.
I would prefer to have the ability to disable the bar, at least when signed in. For those of us who habitually skim through a lot of pages it is a bit distracting and the ability to close the bar on a page by page basis is not really a solution.
Thanks Paul. I believe the green button may be able to be swapped out and tooltips may also be possible, just not in the normal admin interface. I will look at the scripts and see what I can
breakfigure out.Disabling the bar entirely is not possible without some more heavy-duty tinkering. After a few days, at the risk of causing a bit of annoyance, we will try out the left-side option for the buttons — always present, but less like living under a very low ceiling.
In any case, your points are valued, as ever, and well-taken!
Although desirable, disabling the bar is going to be problematic as there is not really a sign in for the main pages (as opposed to forums, ePortfolio or testing centre) so you would probably be relying on cookies to remember preferences which opens up a whole new can of worms!
I think I prefer the sidebar approach–it is much less intrusive and the right (rather than left) of the page is generally clear space anyway.
Indeed, that appears to be the consensus from the team here, as well. Still no luck on getting tooltips to work, but it should nevertheless be do-able.