Update 6/7/2007: A new version (1.1) of the plugin is now available. This version is a major rewrite of the old one aimed at simplifying the number of choices and adding the following features:

  • A “welcome-back” message for returning visitors.
  • Ability to embed a visitor’s name and MyBlogLog avatar anywhere in either the welcome or welcome-back message. Special thanks to Andrea Micheloni’s “Welcome back” plugin for inspiring this feature.

I’ve mashed up a plugin that lets you put out a message anywhere on your blog for new visitors, and hide it for returning visitors. A little background is in order: I’m generally dissatisfied with the way most current blogs are set up. When a new visitor wanders in, what he usually finds is a collection of seemingly random posts with no quick way to tell what’s the blog’s all about and who’s behind it. This information is usually present in some sort of an ’About’ page up there on the menu. While that’s fine for lengthy background and author bio, what’s missing on the front page is a prominent warm welcome message that greets the new reader and gives him a quick overview of the blog. The purpose of this message isn’t only to inform, it has a subtle effect of making a new “hostile” reader who’s ready to scan the entire blog page in mere seconds a little comfortable and willing to spend some more time exploring the rest of the blog. Ultimately, what we want to do is get the reader’s attention, make him feel welcomed, and give him few tips on where to find stuff on the blog. In my opinion, this has a much higher chance of converting new readers into regular ones on the first visit.

At first, I’ve done fair bit of research for such plugin for WordPress that would give me this missing feature. I found two different plugins for that:

  1. Welcome Visitor!
  2. What Would Seth Godin Do

However each one lacked something in my opinion. The first one was not intelligent enough to detect returning visitors who are already familiar with the blog and don’t want to see the welcome message anymore. But the second one did account for returning visitors, but was not flexible enough to let you insert the welcome message anywhere on your blog, whether it’s in the sidebar or right below the header menu.

Welcome Visitor! Options ScreenSo I decided to bring them together to achieve the desired functionality. The resulting plugin is largely based on the first one (thanks Kaf!) so the instructions for installation and usage are all the same. The only thing I’ve added is a little input box in the configuration screen to specify after how many visits the welcome message is hidden, which defaults to 2.

Download Plugin: Welcome Visitor! Reloaded v.1.1

There are couple of additional features which I think would be nice to have in future versions of this plugin:

  • A different message for returning visitors (when the welcome message is not shown). (Update: this is now implemented)
  • Little ’X’ button to let the user dismiss the message. The plugin will never show it to them again.

But this is the first version for now. Hit me up with comments, suggestions or anything else regarding the plugin. By the way, I’m curious as to what you think of my very own welcome message which is shown on the blog homepage. Also, is having my picture up there generally too creepy?