News Ticker for your website.

The Poper News Ticker has two source modes, set in the Content tab. Manual mode is where you type each item by hand, and it makes sense when the content is editorial: a curated promotional headline, a maintenance window, a campaign tagline, a regulatory disclosure with specific legal wording. Each manual entry has a headline, an optional link with an open-in-new-tab toggle, and an optional tag label with its own color. Manual mode does not make sense for anything that updates more than once a week, because somebody on your team has to remember to update it, and they will forget. Feed mode solves the staleness problem: paste a feed URL, set a refresh interval, and the ticker re-fetches headlines from that feed on the interval you chose. Most news teams already have a feed coming out of their CMS, so pointing the ticker at it costs nothing and the ticker keeps cycling fresh headlines. Refresh interval matters: too fast and you waste requests, too slow and the ticker feels stale. The default is 15 minutes, which suits a typical company blog or news section; for a faster-moving feed like a market or score feed, set a shorter interval in the builder. You also set an item limit so the ticker only pulls the most recent headlines rather than the entire feed history.

The widget ships five layouts and you switch between them in the Templates tab through the normal publish flow. Marquee is the classic horizontal scroll, the safe default for a top-of-page headline strip. Rotating shows one item at a time and cross-fades to the next on a timed interval, with an optional per-item progress bar, which works well when each headline deserves a moment of undivided attention. Multi Row stacks two or more rows of scrolling items for sites with a lot of content to surface at once. Typing reveals each headline character by character for a terminal-style effect that suits developer and product sites. Vertical scrolls items upward in a taller container, which fits a sidebar placement next to article content. Every layout reads from the same set of items, so you can preview all five against your real content and pick the one that matches the page. Container width, height, padding, gap, border radius, and shadow are all adjustable per layout, and the Style tab controls background, border, headline, tag, and accent colors plus a custom CSS field.

Moving content has an inherent tension: motion catches the eye, but it also makes the current item harder to read because it keeps sliding away. The Poper News Ticker resolves this with pause-on-hover, which is on by default for every layout. When a visitor moves their pointer over the ticker, the Marquee and Vertical scroll animations pause, and the Rotating layout stops advancing to the next item, so the visitor can read the headline that is currently visible. When the pointer leaves, motion resumes from where it stopped. This is the single most important usability behavior for any scrolling ticker, because without it a visitor who spots an interesting headline has to wait for it to come back around. Keep scroll speed moderate as well: a ticker that scrolls too fast is unreadable even with pause-on-hover, because the visitor cannot reliably get their pointer onto a specific item. Speed and direction (left or right) are both adjustable in the Behavior tab, so tune the speed against your longest headline and test it on a real screen before shipping.

Not every item in a ticker carries the same weight. A routine blog headline and a time-sensitive promotion should not look identical as they scroll past. The News Ticker gives each manual entry an optional tag label, a short word like New, Promo, Sale, or Alert, with its own color picked in the builder. A red Alert tag and a blue Promo tag let a visitor's eye sort the stream at a glance without reading every word. Keep tag labels short, one word is ideal, and use color consistently so the same kind of message always carries the same tag. Do not tag every item, because if everything is tagged then nothing stands out; reserve tags for the entries that genuinely need to jump out of the rotation. In feed mode, items can carry a tag from the feed itself, and where a feed item has no tag the ticker can apply your configured tag labels in rotation so the feed still looks branded.

A static announcement bar is one message, no motion, always visible. A news ticker is multiple messages, scrolling or rotating. Static bars are better when there is one critical message you need every visitor to read: a cookie notice, a legal disclaimer, a system-down warning. Tickers are better when there are several messages of varying urgency that benefit from rotation: promotional offers, recent blog posts, headlines, event updates, hiring announcements. The motion of a ticker is what catches the eye, which is exactly why pause-on-hover matters, because the same motion that grabs attention also makes reading harder until the visitor can stop it. Use a static bar for a single must-read message where motion would work against comprehension; use a ticker for a stream of roughly equally important messages where rotation adds value because no single message dominates. The decision also flips by audience: news, finance, and SaaS visitors tend to read a ticker as informational, while retail visitors read it as promotional. Match the ticker style to the audience. A headline strip in serif type with restrained tags reads as journalism; a Marquee with bright colored tags reads as retail promotion. Both are correct in context. Test the choice with a few real visitors before committing, because a ticker that fits the page compounds: visitors see fresh, relevant content every visit and click through.