UPDATED 13:11 EDT / JUNE 02 2011

Hello Bar Goes Pro, Avoids Becoming Another Ad Unit: INVITES

When it comes to website design, there’s all sorts of tricks you can use to direct users’ attention, call them to action or simply make your site more functional.  Advertisers have known this for years, but website design is something of a lost art for the majority of people using templates or other formatted tools, missing out on opportunities for site visitor engagement.  digital-telepathy, the company behind SlideDeck, is launching a new version of its recently unveiled Hello Bar to help publishers improve their site design.

Hello Bar Pro is a feature-enhanced edition of the original site add-on, acting as a highly visible bar residing at the top of your website.  It’s designed to get users’ attention in an unobtrusive manner, getting them to also take immediate action.  This could be an invitation to donate to a charity, or read your latest article.  In an era where circumventing content overload is a learned behavior, site design is an increasingly important way to interact with end users.  In fact, the Hello Bar helped to raise millions for a Japan relief effort this year, validating the use and the purpose of this tool.

There’s some new features for the Pro version, including the ability to test your Hello Bar prior to publishing it on your site.  This is useful for choosing the right colors and messaging, and seeing how people will interact with it.  The branding has been removed, you get more Hello Bars for free, and the bar will now stay on top of the screen when scrolling.  One of the most important new features, though, is the advanced stats, which cover all date ranges and A/B results, giving publishers additional insight to how the bar is being used, and where improvements need to be made.

It sounds like a new ad unit, but that’s the opposite of what founder Chuck Longanecker wants from the Hello Bar.  At this point in its development, Longanecker is looking to avoid the stigma of becoming a mere ad unit after noticing how many users were implimenting the Hello Bar as an invitation to subscribe to a newsletter or “Like us” on Facebook.  All fine and well, but it’s redundant for a tool like Hello Bar, where site visitors receive the same message, even if they’ve already subscribed and “Liked.”

“We’re hoping to teach users better ways to use the hello bar,” Longanecker says.  “The last thing we want is for this to become another ad unit.  It’s an approach to take, but I think it would be a bad decision, and take away from what we’re doing.  That’s a methodology we’re working on.”

In some ways, the Hello Bar will have to drink from its own cup, using site design, analytics and user engagement to determine how to best convey these company principles to its end users and clients.  To this end, Hello Bar Pro addresses these needs for its clients, with some helpful hints incorporated directly into the tool.  Longanecker is also teaching users to be proactive in their design, and reactive in design tweaks, putting the end user at the heart of site design and engagement.  As Hello Bar grows as a product, analytics will undoubtedly be a big part of the company’s focus moving forward.  One area I’m curious about is mobile, as it presents a new frontier for site design, and adds layers of new concepts to be applied to user engagement.  Longanecker tells me that mobile is an area of interest, both from a product perspective and a client management service.

Hello Bar Pro is still in private beta, but we’ve got 25 invites for readers.  Use the promo code “siliconangle” to register, and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments!


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