A Review of the WP Greet Box Plugin

As a long time user of the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin, I felt like I was cheating on her when I tried out WP-Greet-Box.

Worse was to come: I decided to end my relationship with WWSGD and start a new one with WPGB.

Here’s why:  

I loved WWSGD because of its ability to distinguish between new and returning readers and give them different greetings.

But I was always conscious that returning readers not only got the same greeting every time, they also got it on every page they visited during a single session.

As a result I made my returning visitors greeting into a pure greeting, without asking them to sign up for my RSS feed or anything else.  I didn’t want to nag them to death.

In my new relationship I can be far more sensitive, respectful and targeted.

WP-Greet-Box essentially does the same thing as What Would Seth Godin Do. But it offers you a whole lot more options that allow you to tailor your greetings much more specifically.

Here are some of the key features:

1. You can create specific messages for different users, depending on where they clicked through from.
2. 30 different sites are currently catered for, including the major search engines and most of the social networking or book marking sites. See a screenshot here.
3. The pre-written messages (which you can edit) already contain the links encouraging visitors to bookmark you or sign up for your RSS feed, depending on the most appropriate (or beneficial) action for each referrer.
4. For each referring site, you can define how often the greeting should be offered. You can select anything from every page view on every visit, to once a month (or more) and vary it from one referring site to another.
5. There’s an option for visitors to close the greeting. Whereupon it won’t be shown to them again until the time limit you’ve set for that referrer expires.
6. There’s a CSS file that allows you to style the appearance of your greet box, where it’s positioned on your page, the positioning of your ‘close’ button etc.

The general options screen is where you put in things like your RSS feed (useful if you use Feedburner, for example), define whether you want the greeting to be before or after posts, whether it should be on posts and pages or just posts, etc.

These are all very similar to WWSGD.

The only pain in the butt I’ve discovered so far is not to do with WPGB – it’s to do with the way Internet Explorer (as always) mangles CSS.  The result is that my ‘close’ box button looks a bit odd in IE.  Still working on that one!

I’ve used WPGB for a week now and I do like the extra flexibility and focus it gives me. Hopefully my readers will appreciate not being nagged so much

I hope WWSGD finds it in her heart to forgive me. It was a great relationship while it lasted, but all good things have to come to an end sometime.

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