Let me give you a little background before I get to the Floating Window Review. I finally decided to succumb to the will of the marketing Gods and go back to putting pop up subscription forms on many of my websites… which increased my subscription rate by 200% by the way!

Popups are something that I used to do, but stopped because I hate them so much as a consumer. Well, they work – so I made the business decision to go back to them.

The technology behind popups has changed quite a bit since my last dealings with them, so I did a little investigating into the ones that produce the best conversion rates and checked out some of the newer types of popups like the peel away corners or peel away ads (great for sales pages) and the ones where the background fades away (that’s the one this website uses).

Any of these types work well with my blog and sales websites, but they won’t work with my SBI websites because SBI doesn’t allow ftp access to the server (a real bummer sometimes, but other things about SBI make up for it!).

So I needed a solution that would work with SBI… and I found Floating Windows and decided to give it a try… That’s where this Floating Windows Review finally comes in.

I have to admit that my reason for trying it was more than it’s compatibility with SBI… their website is pretty slick too. Floating Windows has nice graphics, examples of both entry and exit popups, and two nice videos that show you how it all works. Their sales letter is pretty effective (you should check it out if you keep swipe files!).

Cool! I’ll give Floating Windows a shot!

A Little Disappointed…

After buying the software, I was pretty disappointed to find out that it’s actually hosted on the Floating Windows server instead of being a program on my own computer. Oh well, I thought, it won’t matter if it works as advertised. So I logged into the program through a browser interface and got to work creating my first entry popup.

Frankly, I thought the templates that Floating Windows offered were pretty good and were something that I could work with, so I didn’t really try to do too much of my own coding. I just threw together a decent looking popup, inserted the code into my SBI webpage and started testing it out.

NOTE: If you wanted to do anything really fancy with Floating Windows, I believe you’d have some problems because the templates would actually get in your way. The program is pretty restrictive.

Testing is where it all went wrong…

I originally wanted the Floating Window to open each time I entered the site so that I could see how it looked and tweak it, if necessary. What I didn’t realize at first is that there is no way to adjust how often the Floating Window opens. That means that every time a visitor enters the page, the Floating Window appears.

Very bad idea… unless you like to completely annoy your visitors!

Okay, I didn’t like that, but I figured I’d just put the Floating Window on my homepage and leave the other pages alone. That way I could keep the annoyance to a minimum. (I had originally planned to limit the popup to open once per session and put it on all the pages… but not if it opens every time!)

I don’t like to do workarounds, but they seem to be a regular occurance in the internet marketing industry.

By the way, I forgot to mention that you can’t actually open up the Floating Window that you’ve already created to make changes. You have to re-create your window from scratch each time you want to make a change!

So, I proceeded with my testing. First I accessed the page with the Floating Window in Firefox (my browser of choice). It worked fine.

Then I checked it with Internet Explorer… Disaster!

The Floating Window only came about halfway down the page and stopped short. That meant that you couldn’t actually see the headline or most of the copy… just the actual subscription box.

I went back into the program to adjust where the Floating Window lands on the page where it pops up… I actually like my popups to appear in the middle of the user’s screen.

But you can’t adjust that either!

Well, that was the last straw for me. I’ve removed the Floating Window and asked for a refund.

Summing it all up…

Since this was supposed to actually be a Floating Window Review, rather than a rant, I figured I’d lay out all the pros and cons for this program so that you can make your own decision on whether it’s right for you or not.

Positives:

  • Nice graphics and templates included, but might be restrictive if you want to do anything fancy in your Floating Window.
  • Compatible with SBI and any other site where you don’t have ftp access.
  • Easy cut and paste coding is pretty “dummy proof” so even a complete newbie can use it.
  • I briefly tested the exit popup and it worked fine… so this would be a great program if that’s all you wanted. There are some nice exit popup templates.

Negatives:

  • Can’t adjust how many times the Floating Window appear per visit. It will popup every time the page is loaded.
  • The entire window didn’t appear when I loaded it in Explorer… you may have a different experience. In my case, this is a deal killer.
  • Can’t adjust the position of the Floating Window on the screen.
  • Software hosted on third party server. I prefer to host my own software when possible.
  • If you want to make changes to your current Floating Window, you can’t open it up from the serve… you have to re-create it each time you want to make a change.

If you’re still interested in this product after reading my Floating Window Review, then you can click on the box at the left to learn more and see their videos.

I ended up going with Advanced DHTML Popup to work with my SBI websites and Action Popup to go on my blogs (it has a super-simple WP plugin to set it all up). It will do everything I need it to do… but it’s pretty tricky to work with. I don’t recommend Advanced DHTML Popup unless you have a pretty good grasp of DHTML and how to integrate it with SBI.

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