Run a Website or Blog? You Can Help Japan With One Code Snippet

If you run your own site — and we know lots of you do — you can use your pageviews and influence to help Japanese people struggling to recover from yesterday’s devastating natural disasters. All you need is a couple lines of code from the Hello Bar.

We showed off the Hello Bar a while ago; it’s a slender bar that floats at the top of your website, giving visitors a brief message and a link.

Best of all, you only have to insert the code snippet on your site once. From a convenient web dashboard, you can customize the bar with your colors and text. You can also tweak the behaviors of the bar and easily turn it on or off from the dashboard. All of this makes it incredibly easy to solicit donations for Japan now, then turn the bar off or change the message and link later, if you so desire.

For example, you might set your Hello Bar to read something like, “Japan has been hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Click here to make a Red Cross donation.” Then later, when Japan is well on its way to recovery, you can change the bar to contain a message about your favorite charity instead, or simply switch the bar off for the time being.

You can set the bar to appear for a brief interval at the beginning of a website visit and hide itself afterward. If you run multiple websites, you can run multiple Hello Bars, again controlling them all from the same dashboard.

The Hello Bar comes from UX design shop digital-telepathy. If you haven’t used Hello Bar before, you’ll need a new account; just sign up with the invite code “helpjapan.”

And if you don’t feel like signing up for a new app, you can just use this code anywhere in the <body> tag of your site to display a standard donation request:

That code can be used on a Tumblr, WordPress or Blogger blog, too; here are some detailed instructions.

As for which links to use, that’s largely up to you. Here are a few reputable organizations that are collecting funds and working with organizations in Japan to meet the needs of Japanese people:

More About: design, development, hello bar, japan, social good, trending, websites

For more Dev & Design coverage: