Design Suggestions for Bloggers: Comments
Category: Design...
Posted Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 01:42 PM [GMT-6]

It's been a while since I tackled the issue of blog usability, not because it's less relevant today than it was back in '03 when I first dived into it with a post about why people should care about their blogs' designs, but primarily because of other distractions. However, I've started seeing more of a particular kind of thing occurring -- something that is probably overlooked by most people -- and that's the placement of the comments link preceding a post rather than following it.

I realize that most people don't obsess over their blog's template. They've picked a template that works for them and one of their criterion is that they don't have to obsess over it. But that doesn't mean that the template's designer kept the blog reader at the top of his or her thoughts when the layout was created.

If you've chosen to enable comments on your blog, presumably you've done so because you enjoy the conversation...the dialog. If you apply a conversational metaphor to the post/comment process, when you place the comment link at the beginning of the post, it's as if you're soliciting the other side of the conversation before it's begun. That's not very logical, even if it might yield more entertaining results, depending on the nature of your readership.

From a practical perspective, when the comments link precedes the post, the reader may have to scroll back up after reading the post in order to reply to it. Granted, we all can use more scrolling practice, but there are more appropriate places to implement it.

My advice is simple: if you know how to edit your blog's template, move the comment link to the bottom of the post. Everything else -- the tags, categories, date stamp, etc. -- can stay at the top, but dropping that link to the bottom will make it easier for conversations to take place.

Related to this is the odd practice of showing comments with the most recent one at the top. This works if the comment window opens by default at the bottom of the thread, but that's hardly ever the case.

Once again, this practice hardly seems logical if comments are viewed as conversations. You're requiring your readers to follow the conversation in reverse order, which is fine for those who think Memento was the best movie ever made, but that's probably a small and finite population, and quite possibly comprised of many non-blog-readers.

[You may be thinking at this point, (1) "Dude, get a life!" and (b) "Well, if that's the case, why are blog posts listed in reverse chronological order?" My responses are (a) Good point, and (2) The posts themselves aren't conversations. Besides, most blogs are set up so that the older posts drop off the home page; you don't have that problem with comments.]

Last, and probably least, please consider enabling at least month and day for the timestamp on comments. Enabling only the time of day prevents your readers from knowing if they're entering a thread in a timely fashion, or if everyone long ago moved on to something else.

In the end, if you have a blog, it doesn't really matter what I think. OK, it doesn't matter what I think whether you have a blog or not, but you know what I mean. But as I wrote in 2003, you're blogging presumably in order to attract and retain readers, and anything you can do to make it easier for readers to participate is likely a good thing. I simply want you to have good things; that's just the kind of guy I am.

That, and a bit OCD.

Technorati tag: Blog Design