You can use Big Numbers to create nicely designed statistics or infographic content. Get the low-down on this new tool below, including an overview of its features, some examples from early adopters and best practices.
Big Numbers features
- Visually appealing, eye-catching formatting
- Animation effect when page initially loads
- Responsive design
- Accessible text - compatible with screen readers and other assistive tools
- Easy to create and update
Big Numbers in action
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The dos and don'ts of Big Numbers
While Big Numbers offers a lot of flexibility, it's important to keep its intended uses in mind:
Big Numbers is great for...
- Statistics presented as figures, percentages or ratios
- Infographic data
- Brief facts that include numerical content, e.g. years, measurements
- Linking the above content to other pages and websites
Things to avoid...
- Formatting content with Big Numbers that is not statistical or infographic information (e.g. titles, headers, paragraphs)
- Adding formatting to Big Numbers content that isn't part of the template, e.g. heading formatting, lists, underlined text
But why is it bad to format my titles with Big Numbers? It looks so nice!
Using Big Numbers for titles can hurt your search rankings and make it more difficult for your audience to find your content. Search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo scan your pages for heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.). The titles contained in those heading tags tell the search engine what the page is about. For example, the title of this article, "Going BIG with Big Numbers" is contained in h1 tags, and the secondary titles in the article like, "Big Numbers features" are contained in h2 tags. This tells search engines that this page is about Big Numbers. To test this out, try searching for "Big Numbers WMS" using your favourite search engine.
If there are no heading tags on a page, search engines will have a more difficult time identifying what that page is about. That said, it's important to format your titles with heading tags and not Big Numbers.
How to create Big Numbers content
All WMS site managers have access to create Big Numbers content. Big Numbers is a WMS template that can be accessed along with other templates from your site's WYSIWYG editor.
Keep an eye on the for detailed how-to documentation coming soon!
More examples of Big Numbers
You can find other examples of Big Numbers on these WMS sites:
