Month 3 — Introducing Outstanding Bar
So month 3 is finally here! For the third month running we’ve missed our deadline which is definitely something we need to fix, but looking on the bright side we’ve launched 3 out of 3 so far.
So what is Outstanding Bar?
Outstanding Bar is a simple Wordpress plugin that enables you to add a newsletter sign up bar to your site. Simply install the plugin, add your Mailchimp API key & tweak your settings. It’s as easy as that. Now every time a user comes to your site they’ll have the option of signing up to your newsletter.
Wait…another newsletter sign up bar?
You may be wondering why we’ve made another newsletter sign up bar. HelloBar & AppSumo’s SmartBar already exist and do a great job of collecting emails on your site. We thought the same and so we started off trying these out.
Our needs were pretty simple: we wanted to collect our users email addresses without offending them. As anyone who’s used the internet for more than 5 minutes will know, there are quite a few different ways to get people to sign up to your email newsletter and some of them aren’t all that great for the user experience (I’m looking at you, pop ups). For us, we wanted to be more polite & considerate with our users, offering them the chance to sign up to our newsletter without hampering their experience along the way.
The other sign up bars offer some cool features, analytics for example, but they also put their branding on your site and try to upsell you to premium. As a web development team ourselves it felt crazy to spend half an hour setting up a bar with these guys when we could create our own in an hour or two. So that’s what we did. This way we could create our own white label design & add a couple of features we saw lacking in the existing options.
Since adding the bar to our site we’ve had a few positive comments & seen a good spike in sign ups so we thought we’d turn it into a plugin everyone can use.
So let’s get down to it, why would you use Outstanding Bar?
Give your users back control
At CONTRAST, we really believe that providing a great user experience is the best way to build a business. That’s why we’ve created Outstanding Bar with a ‘dismiss’ option. Your users can dismiss the sign up bar, sliding it out to the bottom right. Now they can still have the option of signing up to your newsletter but on their terms. We think it’s a win-win.
Three different display options
After we’d added the dismiss option we thought about how we could give you, the site owner more control. We came up with three different ways to have Outstanding Bar display.
Always
This option simply adds the sign up bar at the bottom of your page, with it sliding up on page load. This is the default option.
Distraction free
This option allows you to collect email subscriptions without getting in your users way. Similar to how some sites will only show the navigation when the user scrolls up & hide when the user scrolls down, you can enable this option to do the same.
Surprise
This option makes Outstanding Bar slide up after the user has scrolled through at least 50% of the page. Rather than bombarding your users as soon as they hit your site, provide them the option to sign up for your newsletter after they’ve expressed some interest.
Remember your users preference
When the user dismisses the bar their preference will be remembered. Whatever state the user leaves the bar in is how it will be presented on their return. After 30 days the bar will come back into view and the user can then re-dismiss the bar for another 30 days. We feel this is a good balance between not pestering your users & reminding them of the option to sign up.
It’s a numbers game
As always we’ve time tracked our progress and this month we’ve spent less time than the previous two months. From 1st February through till our launch on 16th March, we’ve spent a combined total of 59 hours and 14 minutes on Outstanding Bar. To add to this, we also spent a total of 36 hours and 12 minutes on general CONTRAST bits (blogging, site tweaks, general discussions and the like).
From the outset this project seemed more ‘do-able’ and as such we didn’t push as hard & let our standards slip. It’s ok to take a bit of time out every now and then, but we took it too far and ended up missing our deadline (again).
You can download our full Toggl report for all the juicy, time tracking details here.
Rounding Up
As we’ve said before, these things take time. Creating a plugin that’s intended for general use requires robust styling & a fair amount of testing. Then there’s fixing the ever so strange theme specific bugs, it may break in one way on one theme and break in entirely another way on another. Ultimately plugins like ours can be challenging to get to work on all themes but it’s a good idea to try and get a good 90%+ support rate so that you’re supporting the majority of users. As we know from the 80/20 rule, we spend most of our time working on the small, tricky tasks. We found that aiming for the most commonly used themes was the best use of our time.
So there we have it, month 3 has launched. Head over to OutstandingBar.com, install the plugin & drop us a review. We’d love to know your thoughts, whether there are any key features you’d like to see or just how awesome the plugin is, drop us a comment below or tweet us a twitter.
As for us, we’re taking a little sabbatical from #SixBySix. We’re now halfway through and have overran on each of the three months so far. We both have a lot going on in life so it makes sense for us to take a breather before heading into the final three months. We’ll still be releasing our weekly blog post each Monday, working on our processes and gearing up ready for starting month 4 on April 1st.
In the meantime you should sign up for our newsletter in the awesome sign up bar below.
Between the initial draft, edits & publishing, this blog post took a combined total of 6 hours, 5 minutes.
