WP Greet Box

Have you ever opened up your website stats application, Google Analytics for example, and looked at the “referring sites” section? There you are shown the websites that people come from to visit your site the most.

Now wouldn’t it be useful if you could detect where a user is coming from when they visit your WordPress blog, and display a customized message to them? Perhaps a reminder to subscribe to your RSS feed, or to Stumble your post.

WP Greet Box does just that. After dropping the plugin into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activating it, you just have to add a <?php wp_greet_box() ?> template tag where you want the messages to appear in your theme.

Without any configuration, the plugin will display messages when a user visits your site through Google, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, StumbleUpon, or one of a few other sites. Of course, you’ll want to personalize the messages to fit your site better and add new messages for other frequent referrers.

You can enter a website, an icon URL, and set a message to be displayed. HTML is enabled in the message field, so the possbilities are only limited by your creativity. You could put a Digg count widget up when users visit via Digg. Or you could paste in an autoplay YouTube video and RickRoll any Digg users who visit.

There is also a “Visitor Timeout” setting which, on a message by message basis, allows you to define how often (in minutes) a single users will see the message.

This is a neat plugin, and one that seems pretty useful. It’s definitely worth a look. It may help you get more mileage out of social media sites, or maybe convert some more search engine users into subscribers.