Surprise Your Readers With The Welcome Plugin For WordPress
15. Jan, 2008 
11 Comments
Have you ever experienced that warm feeling, when you are just to be introduced to somebody, and that person says “Yes, I know John, we’ve had the pleasure to get in touch some time ago.”?
It feels good to see that people remember you, doesn’t it? But what if you knew this is part of an automatic recognition process? Would it still be enjoyable to you?
Let me tell you this story: a couple of months ago, I’ve discovered an interesting blog, Revellian.com, a mixture of poetry, philosophy, spooky stories and practical blogging advice which can easily get you addicted to it. After a while, I remembered about my discovery, and visited Revellian for the second time. And guess what? In the sidebar, there was a personal message for me: “Welcome back, Simonne…” and my MyBlogLog avatar.
Although I was sure that must be a plugin, I couldn’t stop myself from noticing the positive emotion triggered by that warm welcome. Suddenly, Bobby Revell’s blog became familiar, and made me subscribe and comment, because I felt like somehow I already belonged to that community.
For those of you who want to know the secret of making your blogs more familiar to your readers, find out that it is called The Welcome Plugin, and it can welcome your visitors by name, in these cases:
* If they’ve already left a comment they should keep a little cookie on their computer with their name/email/website. These information help determining the name and avatar (first MBL, if not found, gravatar, or the default image)
* If the visitor is a registered user: in the 99% of the cases this will happen for the admin only, if a WP installation has got only one user. Be sure to set the “email†and “website†fields of your profile, to ensure avatars are shown correctly.
* If they’re MBL users, and you too: only if you display the MyBlogLog graphical widget on your blog, the plugin with a script (you have to activate it below) can recognize MBL users and welcome them.
What do you think? Will your readers love you more, if you welcome them back to your blog?
