You may have noticed recently a fairly new trend of javascript powered bars which slide in from the top of a site or at the bottom. They are used for things like capturing newsletter signups, RSS subscribers or directing people to a special offer / blog post etc. The reason they are everywhere at the moment is because, love them or hate them, they do the job they are supposed to. There are a number of free and commercial options if you want to add one of these to your site, in this roundup I will look at what options are available for your WordPress blog.
Free Plugins
Hello Bar
The Hello Bar is a simple and unobtrusive web toolbar that sits across the top of a website. It allows you to grab your user’s attention and direct them to a call to action.
Attention Bar
If you need to grab the attention of your users to display an important message on your wordpress site, you could go with an alert message ar a styled div in grabbing the attention of your users. However this is very annoying, and the users of your site will not appreciate this. This plugin solves this issue by displaying a nice bar on top of the page, inspired by the Hello Bar (http://www.hellobar.com). Users won’t be disturbed in browsing as the bar is sitting on top of the screen and can be displayed inline, or fixed on top.
Easy Heads Up Bar
This plugin adds an easy to use notification bar to the top of your WordPress website with a linked call to action.
Notification Toolbar
This is a toolbar placed on the footer of your blog and it will show your custom notifications on it. This plugin is developed based on the Static Toolbar plugin.
Quick Notice Bar
This plugin will help the admin to publish highlighted notice on WordPress site header. Any message like offline notice, update notice, tweets, special offers, latest post can be set to attract visitors in 1st sight.
Viper Bar
ViperBar adds an attractive bar to your site header, which you can use to increase blog or newsletter subscribers. It includes built in styling, Aweber & Feedburner integration, conversion rate tracking, split-testing, themes, and much more.
Commercial Plugins
Foo Bar
The Foobar is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to add a highly customizable bar to the top of your blog or website. You can display different notifications on different pages and define a default bar that will display on all your pages.
Attention Grabber
Attention Grabber is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to add a notification bar to your website. With this plugin you can easily display custom texts, Twitter posts and Feeds RSS . Also, the huge list of features lets you fully customize the notifications look.
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13 Comments
Great post… I am wandering for some plugins, which allows the reader to see the excerpt of the next post, when they navigate to the end of the last paragraph of the post. Like the one in New York Times, and Smashable etc.
Hey Oliver – just to let you know – the javascript code used in the free attention bar plugin you mention above is stolen from my Foobar plugin. I went through the JS and it is almost a line by line clone (with some variable renames and comment removals etc). The “author” of that plugin also chose to remove all copyright notices from the header of the javascript and gives us no mention as the original authors.
It is just a shame that so-called developers steal other people’s work and call it their own :(
Hey Oliver – just to let you know – the javascript code used in the free attention bar plugin you mention above is stolen from my Foobar plugin. I went through the JS and it is almost a line by line clone (with some variable renames and comment removals etc). The “author” of that plugin also chose to remove all copyright notices from the header of the javascript and gives us no mention as the original authors.
It is just a shame that so-called developers steal other people’s work and call it their own :(
Is there no way you can report and penalise this kind of theft?
the Foobar plugin’s code has to be GPL since it requires WordPress to function…therefore, not “theft” unless both plugins don’t have the required GPL notice, in which case, they both violate WP’s rights.
Wow. That’s too bad. I purchased Foobar myself and I love it. Great little plugin.
Maybe Oliver should take down the link to the free plugin?
I have also compiled the list of header and footer bar plugins for wordpress. Hope the readers of this post would like it.
http://revolutioners.com/5-wordpress-bars-plugins-that-you-can-use/
Thanks for the great plugin list.
i’ve been looking all over for these.. thank you
In notification toolbar, if we use HTML, it doesn’t work properly.
How about NotifySnack.com? This is a new product which seems to provide similar functionality.
thank You Bhava (Brother) …… It Helps A lot….!!!
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