Posted on June 8th, 2010The comment section of a blog is just as important as the owner’s posts. The discussions that are happening there can bring a lot of new traffic, links and generate new ideas.
A lot of bloggers turn off their comments and recommend that others do the same, using the lack of time for replies and spammers as excuses. Well, those are bad reasons, because the readers of a blog that participate in the comments section discussions often times do not eve expect the owner to reply, and are just stating their opinion, which is an important thing in a free society on a publicly available property (i.e. the blog).
Spammers can be taken care of by some security measures like Captcha and Javascript/PHP checks for bad http requests (like the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress). Of course, often times the users themselves leave useless and even offensive comments (for example, “first”, “a***ole”, and the like), that is exactly why you, as a blog owner, must establish rules and moderate the comments, at least in the beginning.
The moderation can later be left to automatic tools that would filter and remove comments with any forbidden words or even to the users by using a voting system. Most of the times, after your manually imposed rules have settled in, the regular users will down vote and remove all the bad comments that just get in the way of a discussion.
That is why you should leave comments enabled. But that’s not all you can do. If you are a designer or have hired someone to redesign your blog, you should pay attention to the comments section, because there are ways to improve it and make it better for the users. Here are some tips that will help you.
Encourage first time readers to leave comments. The more comments there are on your blog, the better, and you should definitely encourage your readers to leave comments, especially if your blog is new and doesn’t get much traffic. You can do this simply by asking a question at the end (or even in the middle) of the post and telling your readers to leave their answers and opinions in the comments section. Another method, suited better for web developers, is to insert a “Please, leave a comment” or similar message right above the comments section in the theme template, so that it is always there.
Make it easy to comment. Don’t hide the comment submission form under a dozen of links, images and ads. Make it very easy for the users to post a comment. Even people who already commented and want to continue will likely just give up if it’s too hard. Put the comment submission form right under the post, so it is visible to everyone, and use “Reply” buttons in every comment, so that readers can easily reply to a comment they found interesting.
Use threaded comments. Threaded comments are a very good development for blogs. They allow you to basically turn your comments section into a mini forum. Threaded comments are easier to follow, as you know who said what and to whom the message was directed to.
Clearly separate comments. This is something that must be done in the early stages of the development of a theme, but it can also be fixed later with some CSS and HTML knowledge. Separating comments really help people understand where one comment ends and another begins. You may have seen a few sites where the comments are really close to each other, separated only by a thin line or worse, a line break (come on!), and you can’t make out whose comment was it and where it ends. The most common way of separating comments that also looks nice is by using two alternating colors (for example, white and grey, plus maybe a third violet for the admin) for every new comment, but you can also use boxes, lines, larger spaces and other techniques.
Use different fonts for the meta data. To have a better discussion flow in your comments section, it would be better if you made the meta data (commenter’s name, web address, time of posting, etc.) of a different font, format or color. This allows users to focus on the comments and not be confused by the meta information. You can also show the meta data only on request (mouse hover or click) using AJAX or show it at the other side of the comments (i.e. comments on the left, meta data in a small box on the right).
Number and link each comment. Numbering each comment allows readers to easily refer to any comment by number, which is very useful especially when there are hundreds of comments. Having a permanent link to each comment is also very helpful when referencing or even when someone wants to link to a comment from their blog. It’s easier to just insert a link than say “go to this post and search for article 63”.
Use gravatars and comment previews. Gravatars give users a way to personalize their comments (which are pretty limited in the area of customization), which is always a good thing. Comment previews are incredibly useful. Just think of all those times you wanted to see how your comment will really look before actually submitting it. Maybe the formatting was wrong or you made some spelling mistakes, but you couldn’t edit it. If you could integrate some form of comment editing (which is hard to do without risking a weakness in security), that would be even better.
Add the ability to subscribe. A lot of readers are interested in all the replies that follow after they commented, and a lot of them bookmark their comment or the post’s link to come back later and read the replies. You can make it easier for them by providing a subscription to the comments section, either by RSS or email.
There are many other ways to improve a blog’s comments section, and the above tips are just the beginning. What you choose to implement depends on what type of blog you want to create and its purpose, so every blog has its own comments section design that will be most effective.