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When readers leave a comment on your site, the reader is momentarily focused completely on you, be it your thoughts, your words, or something else. Do your readers a favor, and provide some focus back on them.
With the launch of the new design, I had a chance to re-examine the comment section. I chose to more-or-less keep the comment section the same, however I made an effort to provide some special emphasis on allowing the readers to stand out.
Here are several techniques I explored for allowing a reader’s comment to stand out more:
A Prominent Avatar
Comment Avatars
A prominent avatar is probably the best way to tell readers apart. We use Gravatars here, and if you have one, it’s a great way to set yourself apart as a commenter.
I decided to allow the full 80×80 Gravatar to show in all its glory to allow the other readers to be able to quickly distinguish between commenters based on the avatar.
The Commenter’s Name and URL
I’m going to pick on Michael from Pro Blog Design in this example, simply because Michael is a common name.
Showing a commenter’s name as well as a URL is another way to help distinguish between commenters. Many commenters might have the same name such as Mark, Nathan, or James, but there is typically only one URL to each of those names.
For example, Michael is from Pro Blog Design. Combine that with his name and his avatar, and one can quickly tell him apart from any other Michael.
We also allow commenters to put keywords in their name to further tell them apart. For example: Sue @ TameBay. There are very likely many people named Sue, but only one from TameBay.
Too Many Sue’s
Allowing Blog Signatures
Many bloggers I know frown on having blog signatures in comments, but it’s a great way to tell readers apart. Unfortunately, many view signatures in comments as spam.
One WordPress plugin I have seen to try to change this mentality is called Comment Luv. The plugin inserts the latest post a commenter wrote into his or her comment
I personally chose not to install Comment Luv here because it modifies the original comment. I’d really rather have something that kept the signature and the original comment separate. I’m still looking for a good solution short of writing my own.
Color Code or Rank Commenters
Some techniques I’ve seen on the web, such as on WeblogToolsCollection, shows how many comments a person has left.
The above technique uses a modified version of Lucia’s Linky Love WordPress Plugin. The number of comments showing is a great way for other readers to see how prominent a particular commenter is on a site.
One can easily take this concept and develop specific colors to make a ranking system based on the number of comments.
Display a Featured Comment
One other thing you can do is display a featured comment. An example of a featured comment is a comment shown much more prominently than the others. To see an example of this, please visit this post over at theDailyWTF.
Featured comments are shown up front, and then you can browse to view the rest of the comments.
You can also opt to show a featured comment in a prominent location elsewhere such as the front page of your website.
I chose not to utilize this technique simply because of the lack of tools, but it may be my next project to write a WordPress plugin that can tackle featured comments elegantly.
Display Top Commenters
It seems many blogs have a widget on their sidebar that shows the top commenters. This is a good way to incentivize people to comment more, but may also result in less quality comments.
I chose not to implement Top Commenters here simply because I couldn’t find the room in the design, and also wanted to incentivize quality comments over quantity. And, of course, not everyone likes the concept of top commenters.
Conclusion
Within this post I mentioned six ways to tell your readers apart through comments. They were:
- Display a Prominent Avatar
- Show a Commenter’s Name and URL
- Allow Blog Signatures
- Color Code or Rank Commenters
- Display a Featured Comment
- Show Top Commenters
Can you share some other ways to tell commenters apart?
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Great ideas Ronald. Gravatars are fantastic I think. They tend to be much more recognizable than a name. (Unless you have a far cooler name than I do! xD )
I love your second idea, about the URLs, in particular. I used to add “from Pro Blog Design” to my name, in an attempt at distinguishing/promoting myself. Adding the URL in the way you mentioned would do that for you. Great idea.
Ronald, as an FYI on plugins used on weblogtoolscollection.com, Lucia’s Link Love is used in addition to “Delink Post Author Plugin” from Alex King, “Highlight Comment Author” from http://rmarsh.com/plugins/highlight-comments/ and “Moderation Notify Author” which I wrote http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/03/15/wp-plugin-notify-author-on-comment-moderation/ The nofollow tag is used as a reward for regular commenters and every author of a post is notified of a moderated comment in addition to the admin of the blog. In order to allow people to participate in the commenting process and stay in touch with the flow of comments, we also use Mark’s excellent Subscribe to Comments http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/ Judging from the number of people who have signed up to be notified of new comments (well over 10,000 subscriptions on various posts), this is a well used and liked feature. I see you have it on this blog as well.
@Michael,
I wish I could take sole credit for that idea, but I attribute it to Andrew over at WP-Fun. He introduced me to the concept. Unfortunately I can’t find the original post he wrote about it.
@Mark,
Thanks for the FYI. All those comment plugins you mentioned are quite useful by themselves or when used together as you have mentioned.
That Notify Author sounds interesting as we’ve had that problem here with notifying the correct author on comments. We’ve been using a plugin called Comment Notifier, which notifies all authors of all comments, which can be good or bad depending on the size of the blog.
I like your new design–very clean and nicely organized.
@Dez,
Thank you. I’m glad you like it. Please let me know if you run into any issues.
That’s a great idea! One way to show that you appreciate your readers especially those who leaves their comments on your blog posts. Your new design looks so nice.
@Michael,
Andrew sent me a link to his post. It was a post regarding turning off links completely, where he would only show a reader’s URL. I liked it so I took it!
Excellent article Ronald, I may have to revisit and perhaps redesign the commenting section on my own blog.
I like the new design, good job. I also like what you have done with the Gravatars and the addition of the URL. I will have to remember that. Have you seen the CommentLuv plugin? I like the idea of displaying a link to the latest post from the persons blog, but perhaps that would be to much with the URL and their latest blog post.
@Jeffro2pt0.1
I like your commenting section. Having this design up for a bit now, I can clearly see the benefits of showing the reader’s URL.
@Lee,
Thanks on the design. I think it took me four weeks from start to finish, working on weekends and evenings to try to get it done
I have seen the CommentLuv plugin, but don’t like it because it modifies the original comment. I’d prefer to have them separated somehow so that if I disable the plugin, the comment can revert to its original form.
Nice slice of information, but it is probably only for self-hosted bloggers. What tools could those of us using the free-hosted wordpress dot com use. It is really limiting and many of us are sometimes at cross-roads how good a blogger we are because of poor recognition and very few linkbacks. Short of self-hosting, what could we do to gain functionality of some of these tools on our blogs?
Mcneri,
I’m afraid I don’t know too much about WordPress.com. I’m attending WordCamp this weekend and if I run into Lorelle, I’ll be sure to ask her your question.
Great ideas! It’s nice to see that you acknowledge and appreciate your readers!
Mcneri,
I talked to Lorelle earlier today and asked her your question. She responded that there are several ways.
1. Upgrade to using CSS on WordPress.com and use CSS to edit the way the comments are showing up. Unfortunately this is not free.
2. Encourage your readers to use Gravatars and use a theme that has Gravatars in the comments.
3. Feature a reader, such as writing about a reader’s comment, or even allowing a reader to guest post on your blog.
Hope that helped.
I love using the avatars! the faces and experessions and colors all help to identify what type of ppl they are.
It was interesting. You appear very knowledgeable in your area.
this design is a premium design somewhere? i think you can buy it? forgot where though!
The design is top notch and the Gravatar function helps the personal touch.
It really is quite a superb design, very impressive.
I thank very nice sharing
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