Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogging, and something that all bloggers appreciate. And yet, comment areas are a typically boring affair.

By making commenting a more enjoyable experience, you will encourage more commenters to return to your blog to check up on previous comments, and to leave new ones.

Use A Visual Text Editor

The default comments field is boring, and quite limited. It is possible to write your own HTML tags in the comment, but that’s a nuisance that you won’t do often. It’s usually easier to just leave out the formatting, isn’t it?

NicEdit is just 30kb in size, and gives a full featured text editor. Check out the comments field of this post to see it in action. It’s much easier to format a comment this way.

For anyone; NicEdit.

Starfeeder is a fan site for the massively popular StarCraft series of sci-fi strategy games. Naturally, Starfeeder sports a very modern, techy, design to suit the series. Has it pulled it off?

What Has Been Done Well?

• Header image. Most blogs show their topic through a well-thought-up title, a good slogan, or some other sort of written message. Starfeeder however has chosen to use a striking image from the game itself. Very effective, and any long-time StarCraft fan will appreciate the joke!

Ajax is a great technology. It allows you to update various aspects of your page, without ever having to refresh.

The Trouble With Ajax

The trouble with Ajax is that it is overused and abused. Many people try to do too much with it. If you’re building a web-app, fantastic, use it all you like! If you’re just building a blog though, remember your restraint.

Good use of Ajax comes in small doses, and only when it helps you achieve your goals. Can it save you the hassle of reloading the same page? Will it let you accomplish simple tasks quickly? If so, then you’re using Ajax well.

Trackbacks are the messages displayed in the comments list whenever another blog links back to one of your posts. Many blogs disable trackbacks, but not all.

If you use trackbacks on your blog, it is best if they are not mixed with the comments. The comments are a conversation between between real people. Having machine-generated links in the middle of that will only serve to disrupt the conversations.

The method described here will lift out all of the trackbacks, and then display them as a numbered list after the list of comments is finished. Once you have this done, customizing the trackbacks to appear however you want them to is simple.

Dominik Lenk recently asked an interesting question; What are the essential elements of a blog?

In reply I would say that there are very few essentials. It is your blog, and its up to you what you want to include. The only essentials would be to include the basics that you see on every blog, such as a search function, category lists and comment forms.

However, this did lead me onto another question. It is one thing to know the features that technically make a blog a blog, but what is it that makes a blog look like a blog?

Comments are the backbone of a blog. For a blogger, there are few things better than a nice, long stream of comments. As a reader, flicking through such streams can be as enlightening as reading the post itself. It can also be useful to easily spot the author’s comments, to read what they in particular had to say.

As an example, here on Pro Blog Design, each of my own comments looks slightly different to the adjacent comments. Achieving the same effect on your blog is easily done.

The method described here is specifically for WordPress users. Movable Type users should refer to this article, and TypePad users to this one.

For most bloggers, the comment field is one part of the blog that we really want our readers to see and use. As such, it seems strange that the comments form is rarely any different to the default white design.

Adding more advanced effects to the comments field is easily done using CSS. The method has been explained below, and is followed by a few pointers that you’ll want to remember when choosing your effects.

How To Add Effects

The comments field is treated as any other CSS element. View your page’s source code to figure out the ID of yours. In the case of most WordPress themes, the basic CSS code will be as follows: