Show HN: My first weekend project-ThreeBar, a welcome bar for content promotion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My first weekend project-ThreeBar, a welcome bar for content promotion

10 pointsandrewmunsell7 comments

I've done a lot of standalone apps, but ThreeBar is my first service and "weekend project." I built it to take on a new type of project, but I've actually been using the service myself for a couple of months now on my own websites.

ThreeBar is a "welcome bar" service. Essentially, you can customize a small bar with your own message, button, colors, and action to prompt your website's visitors to do "something." The bar will slide down from the top of the page, and your visitor can either click the button to go to a URL or dismiss the bar, in which case it won't be shown to them again.

One use case would be an author that wants to promote his or her new book-- you could put a discount code in the ThreeBar for your website's visitors. Or, if you would like to have more Twitter followers, you could promote your Twitter account by asking your visitors to follow you.

All of this is hosted, so you just drop a script tag into your website's source code (think Google Analytics) and it just works. You can then update, add, or remove different messages from the ThreeBar dashboard without having to update the embed code.

ThreeBar also tracks a bunch of analytics, including the number of times a bar is viewed, closed, or clicked. All of these analytics combined with the ability to rotate different messages or colors schemes could be used for A/B testing. If a bright red bar is being closed at a much higher rate than one that is black, you may want to consider toning the color down, for example.

I'm curious to hear your feedback on the site and service. Please let me know if there's something that stands out, something that would make the service more valuable to a user, any feedback on pricing, or if you have any questions!

You can see a demo of the bar itself on the ThreeBar website (https://threebar.net) or my own website (http://andrewmunsell.com).

Feel free to email me (andrew@threebar.net) with any comments or questions.

https://threebar.net/

First off, great design on your site; it's beautiful. Question: How's this any different from the HelloBar? Not that it has to be. Just wondering if it is.

To answer your question, yes, I would be interested in this product, and a lot of other people would be as well (most of whom are using the HelloBar). So is there a use case? The answer is yes.

How to improve: I would consider making options that are the size you show on the site and also larger. Something that slides down and looks beautiful and serves the purpose that a pop-up serves. I feel like this would be less intrusive than a pop-up (everyone hates them) and would allow website owners to show more info than a single line. So as you mention, an author could have a "drop-down" instead of a "pop-up" that shows their new book and entices orders.

The main function seems to be getting special offers in front of people without needing to alter the website dramatically. An example of this would be a company that's hiring but doesn't know where else to mention that on their page. So for stuff like this, it looks good, and the one thing I'd be interested in would be the option for a larger drop down that could show more than a single line but still looks beautiful (which your site currently does).

At the moment, it serves a very similar purpose to HelloBar. We also track metric such as the number of times a bar is closed, and I have some additional features to make the "action" in the bar more diverse (add options other than opening a URL). The actual Javascript component that runs the bar is very flexible and allows for some pretty deep customization-- not all of the options are exposed in the designer yet. Hopefully these features and some additional customization options will help ThreeBar stand out a bit from the competition and make it more enticing.

Thanks for your feedback-- I really appreciate it!

The bar looks nice :) . The site itself (threebar.net) took a long time to load.

Nitpick/question: Is "Try for free" good copy, or is "Try it free" better?

The titles feel a bit "lost" on the yellow ribbon ("What is it", "Pricing").

Also, I "feel" something missing next or above the one, two, and three options. Maybe icons/images or something.

I'm not a designer, those are just my first impressions.

About the service itself, it's not something I want, but I'm probably not your target audience.

I'll check out the loading time issue.

I may run an A/B test to see if one phrase or the other converts better, but I'll also do some research to see what some other businesses are doing.

Thanks for your feedback and compliments :)

A clickable link: https://threebar.net

Where do you plan to promote this product? Do you have any plans for marketing this?

Right now, I'm advertising on Bing Ads. Currently planning on writing some articles about using ThreeBar to promote content and increase conversions, as well.

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