Ever since we redesigned our website we’ve planned to continually evolve the new site by adding more features, pages, posts and style improvements.

So far this has gone fairly well, and we frequently use our own site as a test bed for some of the functionality that we might like to offer to a web design client. There’s no better test platform then your own live site – if something is not working right there’s a lot of motivation to work out the error and fix it straight away.

We have to say that making changes to the site has become so much easier ever since we started to use the Word Press platform to publish our material. Whole new features can be added in with a simple plugin install and a little bit of styling magic if needed.

Today I’ve implemented 3 updates to the site that I’ve been meaning to address for a while.

Subscribe to Comments

This is something that I’ve always found to be useful on other sites that I find around the web. So often I leave a comment on a website to which I’m unlikely to remember to return in order to check whether there have been any responses. A lot of websites allow you to subscribe to an RSS comment feed, but my feed reader of choice is already bulging at the seams with things for me to read!

Fortunately Word Press makes it very easy to allow people to subscribe to comments via an email subscription option, and it’s all thanks to a neat little plugin by Mark Jaquith. As you can see in the screen shot I’ve provided here, when you go to post a comment now, you’ll see a small tick box with the text “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.”

Once you tick this box you’ll get an email any time there is a comment on this post. The nicest thing about this is that the email will include a simple link to un-subscribe, which is useful when your question has been answered and you don’t want to hear any more on the topic!

Comment Preview

Comment previews do exactly this, as you type your comment a preview box shows you how the comment will look when you click the “Post Comment” button. This may not seem like a lot, but I have often found myself catching grammar errors and mistakes thanks to this feature.

Again this functionality is thanks to a simple-to-install plugin by Jeff Minard and Iacovos Constantinou. There is basically no configuration needed, but it is a fairly simple affair to apply your own styling to the preview as it comes wrapped in an identified div.

Feel free to test it out on this post :)

Comment Links Follow

I’ve taken a decision to change our rules on links posted in our comments. Up until now they had the default Word Press behaviour of attaching a rel=”nofollow” to every link, including the author website.

At the moment I’m so happy with Akismet in its ability to prevent spam that I think real comment posters should be rewarded with a bit of link love.

For those who are unaware, search engines look at all of the links on a web page and see where they point to. The more links a website has, the more important it could be considered to be. Obviously this is stripping the complexities of search engine algorithms down to a very fundamental level, and it’s a lot more complicated than this. However, I think active and intelligent discussion should be promoted and rewarded.

Again this functionality is thanks to a very simple plugin from Michele Marcucci, which follows the usual Word Press installation and provides a detailed options page wherein you can select exactly what links have the nofollow attribute removed.

We have it set up now so that anyone who has posted 2 or more comments (meaning they’ve been moderated once and could be considered a return visitor) will have the nofollow relationship removed from any links they post.