This morning, AddThis released the Emergency Warning Smart Layer project to our Labs pages. As we discussed in a previous post, this was a multi-partner collaboration that culminated in the successful completion of the code at our Hackathon last week.
You’ve probably installed the What’s Next, and Recommended Layers on your site/blog, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Why is that blog post with kittens doing yoga showing up in the layers?!”
Well, the easy answer is because people love watching kittens doing yoga. The not-so-easy answer is that your visitors are constantly sharing and driving more visitors to that page, which signals that the page is trending and should be recommended to other visitors. Then again, you have lots of other great content that you want to appear in those layers as well. So I’m here to help you take control of your layers.
During next Thursday’s hackathon, a group of AddThis developers will drop what they’re doing to work on integrating ValueClick’s emergency warning system into AddThis Smart Layers. They’ll focus first on creating AMBER Alerts that will dynamically display on tablets, smartphones, and computers in areas where abductions take place.
One of the key features of our new Smart Layers is something you can’t actually see. All the share buttons are personalized to each visitor. This makes it much more likely that people will share your site.
Once you’ve added the Smart Layers code to your page, there are a couple things you should know so you can optimize how the What’s Next and Recommended Content layers display on your site. Smart Layers uses Open Graph meta tags to determine how to display links to your pages, and to specify which content is shared from your page.
With the growth of mobile browsing, AddThis has continually improved and optimized layouts, sprites and other elements to make sure that our standard suite of tools works well wherever they are used. SmartLayers was designed to be user-friendly and optimized for phone and tablet viewers. In order to make sure we’re providing that experience, we had to do a lot of testing, across a multitude of devices, screen sizes, browsers and operating systems.
As a publisher using the AddThis tools, you’ll need to do your own testing to verify your user’s mobile experience. Learning to do so is something of a daunting task, but we’ll help walk you through some steps to set up, speed up, level up, and ramp up your experience with Android Emulation, to start.
These days mobile and tablet rule the web, and we’re realigning our focus to create retina-ready sharing tools at AddThis. There are several trends happening, but we chose to focus on the following principles for Smart Layers: flat design, svgs, and the road to responsive, retina-ready tools. Continue reading
Note: As of March 2018, the Smart Layers WordPress Plugin is no longer available for download. If you already have it installed, it will continue to work per usual. To check out and install our supported WordPress plugins, click here.
Yesterday AddThis CEO Ramsey McGrory introduced Smart Layers, an easier way to get more traffic and followers with one piece of code. In this post I’ll go into a little more detail about how to get Smart Layers, what to need to do if you already use AddThis tools (hint: nothing!) and some simple ways to customize Smart Layers for your site or blog.
Today, we’re democratizing awesomeness with the next generation of web tools. AddThis Smart Layers includes Share, Follow, Recommended Content and What’s Next tools all in one line of code. We’re bringing data and responsive technology together for publishers of all sizes in ways that have generally only been available to resource-heavy companies like Yahoo! or Amazon.
