This week the blogmistress asked me to find an online chat/support facility for one of our clients; of course I was delighted with the chance of playing with more plugins!

I had a look at some pretty good paid plugins but also free like livezilla but the client really didn’t need complicated information or software, just the ability to display himself as being online and available to help his customers.  I think there is a need for these fancy dashboards but sometimes information overload just to answer a simple question isn’t really necessary.

I did think of the skype online status plugin that I wrote about but this would mean potential customers would have to faff around if they didn’t have skype already so after a bit of searching I found this plugin:

Google Talk Chatback Widget – on my site it worked like a dream & looks really slick, so with excitement (yes, sadly I do get a little very giddy about these things) I was straight onto skype to our blogmistress letting her know I was going to install it to the client’s site… sadly it didn’t work, maybe conflicts with other plugins but rather than play around too long I decided to try something out, using a new text widget and copying the code from the google talk chatback page.

My first choice out of both options would be the plugin as it has a nice facility if you are offline the customer is pointed to your contact page, also the buttons that are added to your site look professional (although may need resizing, they are a bit on the large side).  Apart from that both do the same when it comes to using chat.

If your WordPress website is plugtastic (hmm, I made that up but you know what I mean, plugins a go go) and the above doesn’t work just go to the google talk chatback page and use the full code in a text widget, you can customise this to an extent (see more info here) by changing the font, size and colour.  It works and without the faff for you or your potential customers.

If you need help with this just comment 🙂

Thanks to Joe O’Sullivan for this commissioned guest post