Wibiya Cool Bar – More User Interaction
Wibiya’s popular toolbar is a nice tool for getting more user interaction with the site and its peripheral social profiles. Here’s a review made after intensive use of the toolbar.
The Wibiya toolbar sits on the bottom of the screen and has many options for user interaction. The options vary from a button to scroll to the top, see the latest posts, search the site, follow the site’s tweets and the Who’s Online application. A connection to a Facebook may be also available for some sites, and the special announcement feature can also be used for important events.
This enables dashboard options for the visitor – he doesn’t need to scan the site or scroll in search for some basic functions. They’re handy no matter where he goes. Apart from the various applications, Wibiya users can configure the colors of the toolbar to match their site. Wibiya’s toolbar has a nice look and feel.
It also space on the site’s sidebar: search, translations and latest posts, Twitter and other buttons can be re-settled on the floating toolbar. Some sites will prefer to see some features appear in both places in order to emphasize them. The saved space can be used to put other content or advertisements.
Less Bounce Rate
The most important benefit is having more user interaction: an option to search the site quickly or have more content accessible increases page views per visit and decreases the bounce rate that publishers hate.
Toolbars on the bottom of the screen are gaining traction. Stock quotes on a bottom bar have appeared on financial television stations for many years, and have found their place on the web as well. When Reuters’ American site was redesigned, a neat toolbar was placed on the bottom. There aren’t stock quotes there, but related and favorite stories – this increases the engagement.
Wibiya built a cool toolbar which is useful, neat and builds on current trend in websites. Another advantage is the easy installation and configuration. The plugin is easy to install.
All the configuration is done on the Wibiya website, making changes in their platform instantly available. The site and the options are very user-friendly. New applications are added to the Wibiya platform all the time.
Wibiya toolbar
The Who’s Online application has Google AdSense banners inside it. These banners aren’t intrusive. Apart from them, I didn’t notice any more monetization. It seems that Wibiya wants to gain popularity before cashing in.
Shortcomings
After all this said, there are still some shortcomings. After using the application on extensively on Forex Crunch, I found some issues. The word that appears by default in the search bar is “Search”. It automatically disappears when typing something, but not all the users type.
I found that many users just click the search button without typing. The first result of this search is the search results page on the site, that loads without any content. Since “Default is King”, many users click the button, then click on the first result and are then disappointed. I fixed this by configuring the default text to the “Find on Forex Crunch”. The result was that the home page was the first result. More home page hits are OK.
Another annoying problem was with the Who’s Online application. This is probably the most addictive application available for the Wibiya toolbar – for the site’s owner and also for the visitors. Seeing many people online makes the visitor see a live website.
The application, supplied by Who’s Amung.Us is well designed and shows interesting figures. Clicking on various options used to show more data on the small shadow that was open anyway, on top of the hosting website. This behavior suddenly changed, with every click opening a new tab, sending the user out of the hosting site.
The third and last problem is becoming a minor one: performance. Although the toolbar loads after all the content of the hosting site is available for the user and doesn’t bug the user, the overall time for loading the page is still significantly longer than it is without the toolbar.
I must say that this has been addressed by Wibiya and that performance is improving. This happens to many web applications that become popular quickly.
Conclusion
All in all, Wibiya is a useful toolbar and rightfully gained popularity. They still have improvements to make, but they are small compared to the shiny look and the added value that it brings.
Website: http://www.wibiya.com
Abstract: Wibiya toolbar platform enables blogs to integrate services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars. Wibiya offers fixed set of tools such as...
Read more about wibiya in The Wadi Index.
More posts by Yohay Elam »
Author: YohayElam
Yohay Elam is a problogger, with Forex Crunch being his primary site. Yohay belongs to the founding generation of Israeli political group blog Black Labor, a writer in the The Networking Blog and maintains his personal bi-lingual blog. Before becoming a problogger, Yohay worked as a programmer in various Israeli startups such as Metacafe.
3 Comments
2010-03-17
11:49:53
[...] our Wibiya review, we’ve covered many popular applications available on Wibiya’s toolbar. Similar to the [...]
2010-03-17
17:17:55
[...] page views per visit and reducing the bounce rate, similar to Wibiya’s toolbar (see Wibiya review and Wibiya’s new applications). PicApp built its galleries so that every view of an image [...]
2010-06-08
13:24:46
[...] settings to play with and no modification to the original site. As we’ve written in our Wibiya review, the toolbar still has some flaws, but all in all, its quite nice, and gains nice [...]
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