As suspected, getting people to download your browser toolbar is the difficult bit – building one is no problem. And here’s how.
For the purposes of this example, we will be using the toolbar creator site, conduit.com. You, though, may prefer to investigate alternative third party services or to download one of the many toolbar building applications that are available. Either way, most of the following will be applicable whichever path is chosen.
After completing the registration process at conduit.com, users are able to dive straight in and design their toolbar. First up, you will be asked to name the toolbar and choose whether to have the toolbar hosted by conduit or not. For now, select to have conduit do the hosting, it’s possible to change this later on.
The toolbar is then allotted a URL and the next step is simple point and click to decide which gadgets and features to have. As selections are made, a mock up of the toolbar appears so you can instantly see how it looks and decide whether to change the left to right order of how the tools appear.
The actual look and feel of the toolbar is limited to the preset template, but it can be branded by uploading a company logo and adding a hyperlink to the image through to your site.
A links button also enables users to preset into a quick menu of links to key pages on their site. But upload and link the logo first, and the links tool will then make a pretty good stab at populating the links button for you. All that needs doing then is to arrange the order in which the pages appear in the drop down menu.
As you build your toolbar up, there is the option to edit from the tool tabs or to click on the elements within the mocked up toolbar to edit and shift them left or right. The only component you can’t delete from the toolbar is the search page, which contains Google Ads. Not a biggie these days, but there won’t be any benefit from click thrus unless your toolbar enjoys a high volume of traffic and is accepted onto the rewards programme. Even if your company site has a site search facility with Google AdSense for Search, you won’t necessarily be losing clicks as toolbar users won’t always be on your site when they’re using the toolbar.
Among the nifty tools offered by conduit.com are:
• an internet radio module which has a tiny overhead and doesn’t open Windows Media Player
• email notifier to give users alerts when new mail arrives in their webmail and POP3 accounts
• RSS newsfeed ticker
• RSS message box for communicating with toolbar users
• Privacy and pop-up blocker
• Toolbar user chatroom
• Advanced tools for dynamically retrieving content from your site to place into the toolbar menu
• Usage reports and toolbar download banners to place on your site
While offering a toolbar is a good way to maintain contact with customers, trading partners, suppliers and anyone else that can be persuaded to download it, there are a few considerations to bear in mind.
Support and help for users throughout the download and installation process is handled by conduit.com as is any on-going issues that may arise during the lifetime of the toolbar. However, it may be advisable to consider not including a few of the components on offer on the grounds of comeback avoidance.
What are the implications of the email notifier, for instance? How secure is it? Users are trusting their user names and passwords to a toolbar carrying your name after all.
And there could potentially be unwanted hassle involved too in offering a user chatroom and pop up blocker. There could be concerns over content/moderation in the chatroom and the effectiveness of a pop up blocker. It would only take one bad incident to dent your company’s standing.
That said, being aware of the potential risks should not dissuade a company from looking seriously at building a toolbar, either to offer to the general public from their site or just to download onto company machines for branding and internal communications purposes. The benefits, to most minds, outweigh the risks. All in all, a good half hour’s work building a toolbar. Undoubtedly, the real effort and time will be expended chasing people to let you occupy valuable screen space each time they boot up their browser to go online.
