Creating a time-activated pop-up

[Manawatu]

Hi All. A common marketing practice on many websites involves a homepage that, after a preset time of 30 or 60 seconds, displays a pop-up inviting the visitor to join a list or receive further info by entering an email address. How would I go about creating such a time-activated pop-up with sign-up form in Web Designer 11 Premium. Thanks.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Manawatu,

It's not a straight forward thing to achieve in Xara. It's quite simple to create a message that pop-up a form after 10 seconds using the animation options (Xara's max delay) but closing it is the problem

I have made a work-around which you can view in the link below, but before I go through how I created it, I'll wait to see if anyone else has an easier solution.

http://parkeston.com/message/

[roly]

Hi, perhaps Xara would consider adding a fade out option to their menu of animations.

Ciao

Roly

[Manawatu]

Thanks, EB. Your sample using the web animation feature seems to be the best bet for now. What was the workaround? Is there some way code can be added to finesse things?

[gwpriester]

The weed leaf for the favicon is inspired Egg.

I moved this to Dear Xara as this is also a feature request.

[Egg Bramhill]

Okay Manawatu,

As I stated earlier the problem is closing (removing) the pop-up message. The workaround is:

Create a page on your main site that has a placeholder that is animated to open after a 10 second delay. (This is the maximum delay I'd want, 30 seconds and most visitors are already somewhere else)

For the pop-up message, create a seperate mini site which has two pages, the first holding the required pop-up content (a form in your case) and the second with zero content. So, when a visitor clicks the close icon it links to the second (blank) page. Similarly, when a visitor completes the form, the form action links it to the second page.

I reality the the second page is still on screen, it just doesn't have any content. You also need to ensure the form mini-site has zero page & pasteboard fill.

I attach the xar files I used to create my example.

[Egg Bramhill]

@ Gary:

The weed leaf for the favicon is inspired Egg.

How did you know it was a weed, I just drew it from a plant in my back garden Gary?

[siran]

Egg, your soultion made me play around a bit, and accidentally I found a solution for a timed popup layer with minimal programming.

[siran]

Just noticed that in my example moving the mouse over the invisible triggering placeholder still opens the popup. So the placeholder would have to be hidden behind some other object.

[siran]

Improved solution that does not need hiding.