WPFront Notification Bar is a free plugin available from the WordPress repository that is ideal for displaying custom messages at the top or bottom of your site.
With the news that my new book, Tracing Your Ancestors’ Lives: A Guide to Social History for Family Historians, is now available for sale on Amazon UK, I went to the WordPress repository in search of a top bar notification plugin to let all my readers over at The Social Historian know how they could buy it.
This plugin just works. It has options, but they are not overwhelming and it is simple to setup. I was able to install it and configure it in just a few minutes, customising it to conform to the colour scheme on my website. Now I want to add the same plugin to my author website Barbara J Starmans.
Configuring WPFront Notification Bar
After installing and activating the plugin, I went to the configuration screen accessible from my WordPress dashboard menu.
The plugin can display a bar at the top or the bottom of the website. The default is top which is what I want. Many of the options default, so I will only go through the ones I changed. I clicked on Fixed at Position to make the bar sticky at the top, regardless of scrolling. I changed the bar height to 40px rather than auto fit because it looks slightly more substantial without being too large. I selected Display Shadow.
I added my message text: My new book is now available: Tracing Your Ancestors’ Lives: A Guide to Social History for Family Historians and then added the Display Button by checking the box and added the button text Buy Now. For Button Action, I added the URL to link to the book page on Amazon using a bit.ly short link so I can monitor the number of times it is clicked. For the button, I chose to open in a new window and made it a no follow link.
To customise the colours to match my author website, I left the bar colour at the default gradient of black with white text, but changed the button colour to the gold shade (#996600) I use on my website.
With the options configured, I clicked the enabled checkbox and saved the changes.
Uses for WPFront Notification Bar
I think the bar looks great and I can already think of several other uses for this notification area.
- Promote products or services
- Encourage subscriptions
- Invite social media followers
- News announcements
- Direct visitors to a landing page
- EU cookie law notification
Summary
The WPFront Notification Bar plugin was created by Syam Mohan and is currently at version 1.7. It was last updated 4 months ago and has been download more than 10,000 times. It has been tested up to WP version 4.7.3 which is the latest version and has 62 five-star ratings.
