Unclutter your blog - comments

Hi all!! Mid week, so we'll clean a bit our blog, to keep up the "unclutterness". Yup that's right, today we'll look into few ways of helping your blog look cleaner by focusing on the comments department. I know, all of us want comments & appreciation, but there are a few things that we can do to make life easier for our visitors.. ok... here it goes

1. Remove all the extra widgets that provide "secure commenting". They just add one more step for our readers to complete. And since they just want to drop us a line or two, sometimes more steps just make people give up and drive them away. So getting rid of that, will definitely make our readers' life much easier.

2. Lose the captcha image. You can add comment moderation to ensure that you receive no spam. But adding a captcha image on top of it, only adds one more step to the process, and there's no point in that. I always say you take one for the team, check through the spam in the background and spare your visitor of that unnecessary extra step.

3. Don't use different, colorful fonts for each individual comment. This step is only creating more distraction, and our goal is to keep distraction to a minimum. Too many colors create a visually cluttered field, and people often shift away from that. 4. Also , if you choose to use one of those fancy "secure comment" widgets, at least lose some of the steps people have to take, like adding their email address or typing some text in there etc. If you want to get in touch with someone, you can always visit their blog and catch up with them that way. I'm sure they would appreciate your visit and this way you can also make connections, not just individual touch-and-go hi-five's!

5. Don't make individual pages for comments. It's easier to use a pop up window if you need, rather than a different page. Pop ups don't load as slow as a new page.. and remember not everybody is high tech. And people love things that load faster rather than slower:)
I guess this is it for the comments department uncluttering tips today.