Hi there.

I’m looking for some assistance on my website. I’m pretty happy with the site as I’ve written it but I would like to be able to get one piece of information from a repeat user. I’d love to be able to get the visitor to enter his or her name when revisiting the site after an arbitrary amount of time (say 24 hours). It’s a dual requirement, firstly as I think it’s nice to welcome people back and secondly because I’m nosy and I write away named visitors to a SQL Database to see when they visited!

For willing visitors, it isn’t a problem as they click on the “Don’t be a Mystery Guest” hotlink and this takes them to a “Remember me” page. Once they’ve entered their name and either clicked ok or press enter it writes a cookie file and the job is done, retrieving the name data from the cookie on their return.

I guess I’d like something like you see on the bigger corporate sites nowadays saying such as do you have 10 minutes to give us feedback, but for my site just saying something like “I notice you’ve come back and visited us again – enter your name for a personal welcome” then have an edit box for the name field. I don’t really want to go down the conventional pop-up window route as many of these are automatically blocked by users nowadays and would also not prefer to go down the reroute to another page as I don’t want users to be put off and leave the site.

I’m fairly savvy with programming having written the site as it is in php and incorporated a few java scripts along the way so I don’t mind if a solution is fairly technical. I’d just like to get these users to add their names in!!!

If anyone has any further comments or tips on how I could enhance the site then please let me know.

Thanks in advance