Techies are notorious for hating anything marketing- or sales-related. Well, at least we start out that way. Some of us eventually grow to realise that that's how you make money and eventually start appreciating it.
That's me -- I started out as a techie but now I'm an online marketer with a technical background so I just love it when I found a smart way to do something marketing-related.
(And, of course, anything to do with Drupal is smart ;))
Enter slidebox.
Slidebox allows you to create those cheesy slide-down "pop-ups" that ask people to sign up for your free report, newsletter, ebook or other goodie. They're useful because they're effective, unblockable and less irritating than traditional pop-ups.
When I say effective, I'm talking about 25% conversation rate successful -- so you know it's good!
We've used this on www.SpotOnForex.com and now, for a new client, on www.FaithLikeMLM.co.za. Whether you trust Forex and MLM businesses or not is irrelevant. These goodies work!
The way it works is that the slidebox module will use a view as its content. Not the easiest method of getting this done but still useful if you want to randomise your pop-ups for testing purposes.
I'd recommend using a little bit of CSS wizardry to hide the node and view titles like so:
.slidebox-container h2 { display: none; }
.slidebox-container .links,
.slidebox-container .postmetadata,
.slidebox-container .node_read_more { display: none; }
Some day soon (or when I feel like it) I'm going to modify this module so you can simply select a node to display in the pop-up and I think I'll add the option to disable everything but the node-contents. I think that will make it easier for non-techie types to use this module on their own sites.
By the way, using this with TinyMCE + the TinyMCE forms module that's lingering around the net somewhere will make your life much easier as you won't have to worry about coding the HTML by hand.
Let me know if you want the link to the TinyMCE forms module I use.
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Chris Luckhardt is a Canadian web media specialist, working in industry since the late 1990s. Over the course of his career in Canada, Chris has worked with countless technologies, equally splitting his time between the worlds of design and development.
Jackson Alsop (not verified) | Sat, 02/16/2008 - 11:11
These are just as annoying as pop-ups.
Prettier, but annoying.
gg
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»Norio De Sousa | Sat, 02/16/2008 - 20:26
Ahh, you might be inclined to think so at first but, remember, with traditional pop-ups, you'd normally end up with half a billion pop-ups to close whereas with these pop-ups, that never happens. Also, with inline pop-ups, the content is almost always related or relevant to the page or web site you're on.
It's not always like that but it often is so I think, all things considered, they're less annoying.
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