The Hello Bar is a great addition to a website – it’s easy to use, easy to install, and effective in getting people’s attention.  Just last week I was having a conversation with someone about using a pop-up welcome to a site, and how it is changing from annoyance to potentially valuable tool.  I installed it today, and I am definitely loving it.

I have been looking for a nice way to welcome people to the site, and I think that the Hello Bar does it, and I think that it does it a bit better than the pop-up.  I just have a “we can help you with your marketing needs” up now, but will probably do some testing to see what works for people/generates results.  The peeps over at DIYThemes have been using The Hello Bar to great success in generating new email subscribers.

For now, I am glad to have it up and running.

It’s very easy to install, the backend is easy to use, and it looks great.  It does impact page load speed a bit, so i am going to try and work on optimizing it, but I would definitely recommend this as a welcome option on your site.  I also want to come up with some creative uses for it – rather than just welcoming people to the site and letting them know they can contact me for help with their marketing stuff.  It would definitely be interesting to run an A/B test with a “pop-up” welcome and see which one would fare better.

If you would like an invite to use Hello Bar (It’s in beta) use the above Hello Bar message to reach my contact page and send me an email!  I’ll give you an invite.

How could this best be used?  What would you like to see on the bar when you visit a site?  What would you use this for?

image via flickr/theoddnote