Add an area for a banner that can display alerts to our users

[ccostino]

As Notify.gov continues to grow with more partners and we look toward improving our operational excellence, we'd like to start exploring how we can communicate more effectively with our partners when we have planned maintenance and/or active incidents.

One way we can accomplish this is by adding an area in our site templates that will display a banner if there's an active message set. This banner could display custom text and/or be connected to whatever service we end up using to send alerts out to partners directly (even if just as simple as adding a link to the alert itself).

There are a few things to be figured out with this, so we're treating it as an epic at the moment until we can get more concrete about what would make the most sense to do.

Potential Ideas for User Testing and Refinement

• Carving out a space in our templates for the site itself that would be suitable for a banner to appear (and figuring out how the banner should look, what color(s), etc.)
• Coming up with a mechanism for turning the banner on and off
• Figuring out how to update the message in the banner without having to redeploy the entire site
• Documenting a process for posting a notice; there may be slight differences for things like planned upcoming maintenance vs. an active incident
• For the future: linking to more detailed notices in a third-party status service if not other integrations (e.g., perhaps displaying the banner automatically with a summary that links to a detailed post in the third-party service if an active notice is detected)