This is a widget that brings up a little preview of a site into the sidebar. If you want to use this in a widget-less / static sidebar, give <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin/" title="blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin">blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin</a> a chance. The link is chosen by random out of the links in the WordPress link-manager. You can specify a single link-category or use all categories for the random-link-base.
You can also decide to show invisible/private links. This is for the case you want to show links as a preview you don’t want to show in the linkroll.
If you want and if there is a description for the link done in the link-description-field it would be shown.
A refreshing via AJAX could be enabled with a specific time (in seconds) when the next thumbnail would be loaded.
This widget uses the <a href="http://www.websnapr.com/" title="Website Thumbnais For Your Site" rel="nofollow ugc">websnapr</a>-Service for generating the thumbnail-images. Keep their <a href="http://www.websnapr.com/terms/" title="General Terms and Conditions for Websnapr" rel="nofollow ugc">term of use</a> in mind. You should get an API-Key for free from there to use this widget and get more then 80 snapshots per hour, with key it would be about 340 per hour (250.000 a month).
Since Version 0.3.0 you could also use the image-link stored in the link-manager for containing the link to the preview-image. If no link is given the widget would use websnapr as fall back.
If you want to translate the plugin, feel free to do it! Since Version 0.2.0 the Output is fully internationalized.
To see the widget working in a production-environment, visit the <a href="http://blog.huebel-online.de/" title="Blog of Kim Huebel" rel="nofollow ugc">author’s blog</a>.
If you want to leave a feedback, feel free to do this on the <a href="http://blog.huebel-online.de/blogintroduction-wordpress-widget/" title="Home of blogintroduction-wordpress-widget - Blog of Kim Huebel" rel="nofollow ugc">plugin’s homepage</a> of the author’s blog. Though the pages are in german, comments in english are wellcome, too.

blogintroduction

Shows a thumbnail of a blogroll/linkroll-entry by random

Atanas Yonkov

Simple Tour Guide is an easy to use step-by-step onboarding user guide that lets you create an interactive guided tour for your visitors. 
The plugin provides a great, neat and fast way to indroduce users to your product or service – by guiding them visually to different elements on your website. 
An interactive user walkthrough is a powerful way to increase user experience and customer satisfaction. This plugin is based on Shepherd.js – an open-source lightweight vanilla js library for guided tours. 
Customize the text, the number of popups (steps) and link to any DOM element through a friendly user admin interface.
<h4>Plugin Options</h4>
You can create a tour and add as many steps to it as you want from “Create a Tour” tab. You can add step title, step description, link the step to a specific dom element and add a custom class to it. You can also choose to display the tour only once or show it everytime you reload a page (test mode) and ask for confirmation when the close button is clicked. Another cool feature is the ability to choose on which pages to display the tour. If you want, you can also choose to display the tour to logged in users only and disable the rest of the site while the tour is active. You can also add a progress bar to show the users how many steps remain until the end of the tour and customize the colors of the step buttons and the progress bar via the “Style” tab.
<iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TRHfuENMbzk?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe>

Simple Tour Guide

That's exactly what I needed. Great idea.
Thanks!

Great

Nice plugin !

Easily add an interactive step-by-step user guide (intro tour) for your visitors. Based on Shepherd.js (https://shepherdjs.dev/).

blogintroduction vs Simple Tour Guide