Day 4: Attention Grabber: A Floating Notification Bar For Wordpress. #30plugins

This is Day 4 of the 30 Days, 30 Killer Wordpress Plug-ins Series.

You’ve probably seen a number of sites which use a notification bar at the very top of the site. And, when you scroll, it stays in place.

Many people use them for time-sensitive announcements like special offers, contests, sales – whatever.

Now, there are a few ways to go about it. One option that got really popular for awhile is Hellobar. Hellobar is a nice solution, but personally I find the pricing to be rather annoying. You can use it for free up to 25 clicks per month, then you need to start paying for it on a monthly basis. And, while I’m all good with paying for good things, paying a recurring fee for such a simplistic plug-in just rubs me the wrong way. 🙂

There’s also options like Viperbar, Wordpress Notification Bar, and Sticky Notification Bar, among others. Of those, Viperbar is the best option, although when I was using that one, it was giving me some odd issues and I ended up removing it.

The one I eventually went with is called Attention Grabber, from the folks at CodeCanyon. It costs $12, but it is worth it in my opinion. Some of the things it does are:

• Fixed and inline positioning
• Animation effects
• Ability to pull in from Twitter or any RSS feed, right into the bar
• Multiple fading messages
• Click tracking
• Customization options, so you’re not stuck with the pre-built templates.
• Shortcode support

My own personal usage of this has been to notify site visitors of time-based special offers. For example, if I was running a sale, I would run a notification bar which linked to it during the time of the sale. Then, disable it.

This is probably not one of those plug-ins you’ll have activated all the time. If you have a bar like this on your site all the time, your readers will go blind to it. But, when you have something where you want site-wide notification without interfering or altering your site layout, Attention Grabber is a nice plug-in to have.

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