Today I’m starting a new series called “Gems of Docs”. I want to use this to highlight some features of our plugins that we’ve documented, but that seem overlooked. I also want to highlight great use-cases for how you can implement them on your site to excellent effect.
Custom Captions in FooBox
To kick off this series, I wanted to highlight my latest favorite tool in FooBox: Custom Captions. First, head over and read the docs article about it: Custom Captions.
OK, so from that docs page you can see that you can do two cool things with Custom Captions in FooBox:
- Show a simple, static, but unique caption title and description per image
- Show a dynamic and unique caption and even more stuff to the caption field like custom buttons and urls
Why Custom Captions Are Useful
OK, in the first example on that page, you can see that you have a single image, with a unique caption. Really, that’s not so special. But think of it this way: When you upload an image to the Media Library and add its unique alt tag (because not doing that is SEO-criminal) and its title and (optionally) its caption, those things are now set every time you use that image.
But what if you want to use that image on a different page with a different caption? Ah ha! Now you’re interested!
That’s why the simple ability to create a custom caption per image is really useful. The same image can have multiple captions throughout your site. That way you don’t have to keep uploading the same image and have it be resized and hogging up precious resources. Because we all want to optimize our image use in WordPress, right?
Creative Use Cases for Custom Captions
Writers
Say you are an author and want to highlight the awesome cover design of your new book. Load that bad boy up in FooBox with a simple link. But, of course you don’t want folks to just look at the book, you want them to BUY it. So use the second example to create a Buy Now button with your affiliate link to Amazon in it.
E-Commerce
Most WordPress based e-Commerce sites have a dedicated blog area separate from their products. So how do you highlight a product in a blog post? This is especially un-intuitive with WooCommerce (though it’s a piece of cake with Cart66). Here’s an idea: Just drop your product image into a post, launch it with FooBox, and add the product url into the custom caption. Boom! Conversions increase from your blog to your products.
Related Posts
Remember what I said I few weeks ago?
You see what I did there? Oh… you didn’t click the link did you? Well click it! It’s like a teaser to get readers reading more of your site. They launch the link, see the fancy quote, and can open up that old article right there. Increased page visits, decreased bounce rate. All good things.
You Can Custom Caption too!
Now that you know you already have this ability, go think about your site, and think about FooBox, and make it happen. Would love to hear about your clever use cases in the comments below.