Outstanding Bar

Description

Outstanding Bar is a simple plugin that adds a newsletter sign up bar to your site. It comes with 3 options to give you flexibility in how you display the bar which you can tweak in the settings.

Consistent

This option simply keeps your bar at the bottom. 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 50% of the page. It can work well for blogs as it presents the email sign up option at the appropriate time, after the user has read some of your content, rather than asking them to sign up as soon as they land on your post.

The Dismiss Button

The other feature we’ve added is again with users in mind, with a ‘dismiss’ button. The dismiss button can be customised to any text you want & simply put it slides the newsletter bar off into the corner, so the user can enjoy your website without always having a newsletter sign up bar in the way. Then when they want to sign up, or get intrigued what the button in the bottom right is, they can click it and it slides back out.

Screenshots

Installation

This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.

Install the WordPress plugin.

• You can either do this by going to your WordPress dashboard > Plugins & search for ‘Outstanding Bar’ or Download the zip file & upload to the ‘plugins’ folder on your server. Once installed, activate the plugin.

Grab your Mailchimp API key

• Login to your Mailchimp account.
• In the top right, click on your name (or avatar) & from the resulting drop down select ‘Account’
• In the resulting page, click ‘Extras’ > ‘API keys’.
• Under ‘Your API keys’ click ‘Create A Key’.
• Optionally set the label for the key, then select the API key and copy it.

Tweak your settings

• In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to ‘Settings’ > ‘Outstanding Bar’
• Add your Mailchimp API key and tweak the settings to your taste.

FAQ

Wait, what’s Outstanding Bar?

Outstanding Bar is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to build your email list without annoying your users.

Who made this?

Outstanding Bar is from those CONTRAST guys and is the third project of #SixBySix, our challenge to launch six projects in six months. You can read more about Outstanding Bar here.

Why are you doing this?

We created Outstanding Bar as we wanted a more elegant way to build our email list. We tried the alternatives but found them lacking, both visually & in functionality, so we made our own.

How is this any better than the alternatives?

We’ve added a few features, like show after user has scrolled x% of the page, show only when the user scrolls up (distraction free reading) & a button that slides the bar to the corner. Plus, we’re biased, but we think ours looks better.

I’ve got some feedback, how can I let you know?

Sweet! We’d love to hear it. Drop us an email or tweet us a twitter.

Which browsers & WordPress versions do you support?

Browsers: We’ve done our best to support IE9+ & the recent versions of all the major browsers.
Wordpress: We’ve tested WordPress on version 4.1 onwards, but feel free to give it a go on any version you like. We’ve tried to make the code work across as many themes as possible but there will always be some strange quirks we were unable to anticipate. Feel free to send us an email but the quickest, easiest thing will probably be to edit the theme yourself.

How can I find out more?

If you wanna keep up with #SixBySix or hear when we launch something new, subscribe using the handy Outstanding Bar at the bottom. Ooh, look at that.

Reviews

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.1.3

• Fix CSS gradient display issue
• Update Tested up to 4.3.1

1.1.2

• Fix specificity issue with styling on some themes

1.1.1

• Fix validation issue with MailChimp API Key (Thanks to Scott Werner for pointing this out)
• Update Tested up to 4.2.2

1.1.0

• New: Add option to set custom thank you message
• New: Add option to set if to use Double Opt-in
• New: Add option to set the email placeholder text
• Fix: Make hide button use the selected text colour

1.0.3

• Add confirmation message after submitting email

1.0.2

• Fixing email input margin & tweaking overall bar padding

1.0.1

• Fixing mobile & tablet styling

1.0

• Initial release!