A New Toolbar Can Boost Your Web Site Traffic Dramatically - Building the toolbar
(Page 2 of 5 )
You begin building your toolbar by visiting the Conduit Homepage. A simple wizard style interface walks you through the building process. You just choose the components you would like to include.
Several components are included in every toolbar. You can choose whether they are visible or not by default. A radio, e-mail notifier, and community chat are just some of the many tools you can integrate into your toolbar to add to its functionality.
The toolbar is also fully customizable once installed in your user’s browser so they can add and remove components according to their own needs and preferences as well. This gives your users even more reason to keep the toolbar loaded.
You can begin building your toolbar from scratch or by selecting one of the many pre-built template themes. I chose to start from scratch when building the toolbar for this review.
The toolbar can be fully branded. You are able to customize nearly every component with your own logos. In the first step I added the Developer Shed logo to the main toolbar menu button.
The only component that you are required to have visible is the search box. In the next step, I customized the default search list by adding igrep, Developer Shed’s own dedicated search engine.
I continued to further customize the toolbar by adding several RSS feeds and link buttons. I added customized graphics to most of the elements, but Conduit provides a wide range of icons to choose from if you don’t have any.
You can also add a customized drop-down menu to your toolbar. A local XML file contains the menu contents, so it can be updated at any time without your users having to download the toolbar again.
The news feeds, RSS feeds, and menus all allow you to specify how often the toolbar should look for updates. This means that the toolbar can update while the browser is open, guaranteeing that your users always see the latest available information.
Another very useful tool is the message component. This feature allows you to send RSS based messages to all of your toolbar users simultaneously. This is a great tool for making sure that your users always have the latest breaking news or content that you provide.
Once you’ve added the basic components, you’ll be asked to supply a name for your toolbar, a password, and the default language for your toolbar. The name and password will be used to log in and complete your final customizations. You’ll be able to log in at any time in the future to modify it as well; any changes will roll out to all installed toolbars automatically.
The toolbar will also notify users when periodic updates are released by Conduit for the base software framework that the toolbar runs on. This ensures that your users are always safe, knowing that they are using the latest technology available.
Unlike some free services, you aren’t limited to just one toolbar. Create as many as you like and link them to the same account. You can quickly build a new toolbar—based on an old one—by using the duplicate feature.
Next: Distribution and Branding >>
More Embedded Tools Articles
More By Nilpo/Developer Shed Staff Writer
/ 20 
