[thelist] popup splash without being intrusive and annoying!

[Phil Turmel]

Drew Shiel wrote:
> At 10:41 28/10/2004, Andrew wrote:
>> I want to provide visitors with a promotional offer without it being
>> permanent and once displayed or closed thats it the session is killed.
>>
>> Some views on this would be nice before proceeding.  I am thinking about
>> just making a link more visible than anything else but the reason for not
>> doing this is I don't want to amend the rest of the design of the site

>   I've occasionally had things like this in the past. Essentially, in 
> pseudocode, the logic goes:
> 
>   If user has no promo cookie
>         - set promo cookie
>         - do popup
> 
>   That way, if they've seen it at all, whether or not they took it, it 
> doesn't pop up again. After your promotion is over, you can either just 
> remove that code, so that no new cookies are set, and the old ones 
> remain in place, or you can be nice and drop in some code that deletes 
> existing cookies as well.

Downsides to the above... if your new, anonymous visitor is 
at all security conscious, they won't let you have anything 
more than a session cookie, so they'll see the promo again 
if they revisit your site at some future date.

Such people also tend to run a popup-blocker (eg. Mozilla's 
built-in one).  Such a splash would be treated as an 
"unrequested pop-up" and killed.  The promo offer popup 
would have to be tied to a link on a regular page for such 
visitors.

If your visitors are known to you, and you have some form of 
login and session activity, you can record the relevant 
information in your server database and offer the link 
accordingly.  Or talk them into whitelisting your site in 
their cookie manager.

FWIW

Phil T