Capturing the attention and directing the actions of users is extremely important for website builders. Eyeballs make or break the functionality and navigation of a site and in a lot of cases, most visitors simply bounce off the page they visit, so a great deal of designers aim for getting eyeballs past that first page. Enter digital-telepathy and their addition to web design, the Hello Bar.

The hello bar is a simple message bar that sits across the top of a website. The goal of the hello bar is to grab your user’s attention and point them to an area of interest. It can be used for internal CTA’s, links to articles/blog posts, tweets, important notifications, updates or anything else that you would like to call attention to.

You have probably seen these before on other websites, browsers, or applications.  It is by no means a new idea. Our goal is to allow anyone to easily & quickly create a Hello Bar and embed it on their site. Once it is implemented, users will easily be able to manage, edit, and even view reports in a simple admin panel.

This concept is by no means new or really that innovative, we’ve seen it in use across the web: displaying a little bit of unobtrusive information at the top of a web page in order to attract attention and drive users to further information or advertisement. That’s not to say what digital-telepathy has done to it isn’t extremely useful. It produces a bar that appears on the top of the page with a short message (possibly within 100 or so characters maximum) that provides a form of navigation. It also includes an arrow element that permits users to make it go away and it stays away after I click it between page changes. There are numerous pages that have top bars that I wish I could make them go away—for example Google’s Blogger.

It looks like the design firm has done an excellent job producing a brilliant WordPress embed that is clean, clear, and extremely customizable. The backend to my estimation is very direct and neat and provides a highly efficient user interface. It also comes with a use metrics package permitting the site organizer to understand how visitors are seeing and using the bar.

digital-telepathy is credited with the generation of another jQuery plugin for WordPress called SlideDeck, which uses a very similar animation and has gotten quite a bit of credit for its capability to drive eyeballs. Just like SlideDeck, the Hello Bar animates itself by sliding on to and off of the screen. If anyone is wondering about the efficacy of their work, SlideDeck has a case study from CrazyEgg—a metrics service used by sites such as Amazon, eBay, and Dell. According to the case study, SlideDeck did very good things for their own metrics.

Perhaps Blogger will take a card from the Hello Bar and make their own “hello bar” at the top capable of disappearing when I tell it to and staying away until I call it back out again.

If you’d like to try Hello Bar out for yourself, we have 50 invites for our readers.  When signing up, use “siliconangle” as your promo, and you’ll be good to go.