Story by
Courtney Boyd Myers
Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups gr Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups grow internationally. Previously, she was the Features Editor and East Coast Editor of TNW covering New York City startups and digital innovation. She loves magnets + reading on a Kindle. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter @CBM and Google +.
There’s a lot of noise on the Internet and we know it can be overwhelming. That’s why slick, easy to navigate websites are so important.
But with our ever shrinking attention spans, even a sweet website still needs a Cliff’s Notes. Meet: The Hello Bar, a fun new product that lets website owners prominently display their most important message in a highly visible bar on top of their website.
“With Hello Bar we saw this opportunity on the most visible area of the site for a company to promote one, important message that will encourage your users to take a certain type of action,” explains Chuck Longanecker, Founder of the Hello Bar.
Hello Bar, which recently launched in beta at the end of November 2010, was made by the San Diego based Digital Telepathy team who also built SlideDeck, a popular jQuery slide plugin. Just a few months after launch and The Hello Bar currently has 10,000 users.
See how easy it is to embed the Hello Bar here:
Hello Bar has been kind enough to offer TNW readers access to try it out. We have 250 private beta invites; get yours by visiting their web site and using the code “nextweb”. Once they open publicly they will be charging for both the basic and a future pro-version. The pro-version will include more flexibility like scheduling.
The customizable tool bar comes with a management system including statistical information (click rates) and an administrative interface that can be used across multiple sites that you wish to use Hello Bar on. You can update the toolbar’s message via Twitter and sync it to an RSS feed. A mobile version is on its way.
Would you use the Hello Bar on your site? What other great ways can you think of to capture someone’s attention on the Internet? (No Rick Rolls please.)
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