How to schedule a homepage banner

A banner is a hero slide on your live Shopify homepage, built and scheduled from inside Tideswell so the launch graphic sits with the campaign work rather than in somebody's calendar reminder.

It appears on a task rather than on a Store page, which surprises people. That is deliberate: a banner belongs to the campaign it is promoting.

Before you start

Three things have to be true.

• You need write access to the store surfaces, the same one that covers stock corrections.
• Your Shopify connection needs theme permissions. A store connected before those were required shows a warning in Settings › Integrations naming the banner scheduler as what breaks without them. See How to manage integrations, your workspace name and the audit log.
• The task needs an active Home Page Banner sub-task on it. The section appears only then, and disappears once that sub-task is completed.

How do you get the section to appear?

Add a sub-task called Home Page Banner to the campaign task, and leave it unfinished. A Home Page Banner section then appears in the task's detail panel.

Adding sub-tasks is covered in How to break a task down and put it in order.

Doing it this way means the banner is visible to whoever picks up the campaign task, and the sub-task is the thing somebody ticks when the job is done.

How do you build one?

In that section, upload the banner photo by clicking the tile. It is compressed in your browser before it uploads, and clicking the tile again replaces it.

Then fill in a Title, a Subtitle, and optionally Button text and a Button link.

Images can be png, jpeg, webp, gif or avif, up to 25 MB. A photo has to be uploaded before a banner can go live.

How do you schedule it?

Set a Go-live date and time and an End date and time, then press Schedule.

A background job publishes it when the go-live time arrives and takes it down at the end time, so nobody has to be at a desk at 6am.

Times are read in your browser's timezone, so check them if you are scheduling from a different country to the person who briefed you. The end time has to be later than the go-live time.

How do you publish or remove one immediately?

Publish now pushes the slide onto the live homepage straight away. Take down now removes a live banner.

Both act on the real storefront immediately, so treat them the way you would treat any change your customers can see.

What do the badges mean?

• Draft: saved, with no go-live date set.
• Scheduled: saved with a future go-live time, waiting.
• Live: showing on the storefront right now.
• Ended: it ran and was taken down at its end time.
• Failed: a publish or take-down did not work, with the reason recorded.

Why did a publish fail?

Most often because your theme has no hero slideshow area that Tideswell can recognise, and the message says exactly that.

A banner is inserted into an existing slideshow section in your theme. A theme built without one has nowhere for the slide to go, which is a theme change rather than a Tideswell setting.

The other common cause is theme permissions missing from your Shopify connection, which Settings › Integrations detects and names. Reconnecting the store fixes it, and the banner can then be published again.

Is this on the phone?

No. Building and scheduling banners is done on the web, alongside the rest of the campaign work it belongs to.