By design, blogs seek to foster conversation. You post, ask for comments, and look to engage in discussion. The lifetime of a post can exist long after you press “Publish.”
But a single post isn’t the only thing you want your readers to pursue. You want them to come back, engage with others, explore other posts, and so on. You don’t want drive-by readers but you can’t expect them to do all the work themselves. As such, you want to make sure their experience on your site fosters conversation, high usability, and prompts them to continue exploring your content.
It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Check out these three plug-ins that enhance the user experience and that require absolutely no coding in order to get them up and running.
Subscribe To Comments
Oftentimes, conversations are what help the initial post mature after it has initially been published. This is where you connect with your readers and your readers connect with others.
But you don’t want to hold your readers accountable for remembering to come back and check your page. After all, they’re reading at least as many blogs as you are. So give them the option to subscribe to comments.
Subscribe To Comments is a free plug-in that allows the user to opt-in to be emailed whenever new comments are applied to a given post. If you’re not going to be using a third-party commenting system, this one is worth checking out.
Fancybox
Embedding images in posts is a good thing; however, many of us often end up linking from a resized version of the image to its full-sized version. This can interrupt the user’s experience as it takes them away from your page and then it forces them to navigate back to your site.
You should seek to keep your users on a given page as long as possible even in the context of linking to an image. Enter Fancybox.
It’s a free plug-in that will transform any linked, embedded image into a slick overlay. All you have to do is install it.
Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in
Finally, if you’ve written tons of articles, the last thing you want is one-stop-shopping readers. Once they’ve landed on a post and are browsing your content, it’s nice to offer them articles similar to the one that they’ve just finished readings.
Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in (or YAARP) does just this. Although it will provide suggestions for related posts right out-of-the-box, it offers the ability to continue tweaking the metrics in order to make better suggestions. Furthermore, the suggestions that it writes out at the bottom of a page will show up in the feed of your RSS readers.
Note that in a previous article, John mentioned that YAARP has potential to act as a bottleneck for very large databases and offered another alternative as provided by Google. When making your decision, always evaluate what will work best for you and your organization.
Constantly looking for ways to improve your users’ experience should be the goal of every developer. When it comes to visiting your site, this often means looking for ways that you can absorb the pain rather than your visitors having to do so.
What other plug-ins have you found or tweaks have you made that have ultimately contributing to the overall experience of your site?
Aaron Melton says
Subscribe to Comments would be *really* robust if it allowed for two different types of subscriptions:
1.) Subscribe to comments (aka subscribe to ALL comments)
2.) Subscribe to comments to my comment (which is what I’m really interested in)
Tom says
True. That’s one of the things that third-party commenting systems have up on something that is self-hosted.
Ted Carnahan says
I also use Subscribe to Comments, but I don’t like that it hasn’t been updated since Dec 2007. There are so many changes in the plugin architecture since then, that a revamped plugin would be nice. (Of course it doesn’t help to sit here and whine – patches welcome, right?)
John Saddington says
hehe. yes. so far, it works well.
Kyle Reed says
Some kind of comment stream like disqus or ID would be very beneficial as well.
Tom says
If you’re into that =P
Kyle Reed says
Obviously, you are just missing out and so is church crunch.
Actually i am not smart enough to be into my own comment system
dustinuga says
great, thanks for the suggestions!
Stephen Bateman says
One thing I really liked about Intense Debate (Disqus too I suppose) was being automatically subscribed to comment replies.
As much as I love conversation, subscribing to the comments section of every post I comment on, or even just the good ones, would leave my email delete button sucking wind.
The related post one is a good idea, I’ve never really fiddled with RP, mostly because my content has never been focused enough for that to work.
Tom says
Depending on the sites (read: the 8bit sites), I actually have an email filter setup to catch the comments. No, this isn’t feasible for every blog you visit, but if you’re a major commenter or contributer, it works alright.
And, yeah, Related Posts do benefit from focused content, but if you tag things similarly, you may be able to leverage that as a metric moreso than post content. Just a thought, though.
Paul Sanduleac says
Thanks for the roundup!
Tom says
Sure thing, Paul!
Kenny says
Another option for a recommendation engine for related posts is LinkWithin:
http://www.linkwithin.com/learn?ref=widget
The neat feature of this one is that it automatically produces thumbnails for each of the related link recommendations added to the bottom of your post. There are options for how many rec’s you want to feature too which is nice.
John Saddington says
ah, that’s pretty neat.
Tom says
Cool – thanks for sharing!
PhillipGibb says
Fancybox, I ,liiiiiiiike
Tom says
It’s just so … fancy …
Brett Barner says
Installed FancyBox. I feel under dressed to be using something so fancy. 🙂
Tom says
It’s definitely true and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Unless you blog in your Sunday best.
brett barner says
Typically I do, but I’ve misplaced my monicle. So un-fancy…
chad swanzy says
Hey… just added the fancybox plug… makes total sense and added a lot of value to the site. Thanks for the info.
see you at orange
Tom says
Good stuff – thanks for the comment 😉