Are you looking for an easy way to promote your iPhone app to your church members? One way to do this is to place a smart banner on top of your website. A smart banner appears whenever someone visits your website using Safari on the iPhone. Here is what the smart banner for my church looks like:
Smart banners are a great way to subtly promote your app to your website visitors without being intrusive. All it takes is a little bit searching and small piece of code. Interested in giving it a try? Here’s how you do it.
First, go to the iTunes Link Maker and search for your app. On the right hand side you will find a link labled “iPhone App Link”, click on that link and a pop up window should appear and you will see a piece of code that looks similar to this:
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brentwood-baptist-church/id591905765?mt=8&uo=4" target="itunes_store">Brentwood Baptist Church - Subsplash Consulting </a>
Now the piece of information you need from the above code is the nine digit number between “id” and “?mt”. In my case, it is “591905765”. This is known as your “app-id”. You’ll need this “app-id” in our next step.
Second, copy the following piece of code in a text editor or the code editor of your choice.
<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID, affiliate-data=myAffiliateData, app-argument=myURL">
Now take your “app-id” (the nine digit number from step one) and use it to replace the text “myAppStoreID”. Your code should now looking something like this.
<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=591905765, affiliate-data=myAffiliateData, app-argument=myURL">
Now copy this new piece of code and place it in the header code of every page on your website where you want the banner to appear. For most websites, placing it in index.html file will be enough. Once your html file is modified, try loading your site on an iPhone and the banner should appear.