Allow your users to Subscribe to comments
When you allow users to leave there opinions they might want to follow up that conversation. Although it’s possible to do that by subscribing the comments RSS they might want to get email warnings instead.
I’ve been using Subscribe to Comments for years and I’ve found a reasonable number of users subscribing to comments on posts they have given their opinions. Allowing your readers to choose if they want to be warn when there’s an update on a specific post is improving the user experience.
WordPress Subscribe to comments plugin
Users can edit their comments after submitting them
One of the most embarrassing comments I’ve ever made was about 2 years ago on a popular blog. It was past 1am and I was finishing up some work when I did a pause. I read an interesting post about SEO and left my comment. Fortunately I went back to the post again and re-read it. I ended up noticing that the comment I had left was pure nonsense. I wish I had the chance to change that. Would save me some embarrassment.
For that you have a plugin called WP Ajax Edit Comments which allows all users to edit their own comments without the need to be registered or logged in.
Better printing experience
One other subject I take in consideration is printing. The most common practice when someone wants to print an interesting post is printing the whole blog layout or printing a selection. But the best practice is when a user chooses to print and will only print what he wants.
For this you have two options:
- Create a specific CSS for print
- Use a plugin for that effect
Personally I prefer to create a specific stylesheet for print and apply the layout I want. But WP-Print plugin does a terrific job
and it’s a very good alternative for hand-coding your printing styles.
iPhone, Cell Phone, PDA navigation
Recently I just ended my mobile internet contract. The reason is quite simple, I don’t use it that much and when I do I don’t really get to visit the websites I want. Smashing Magazine has a mobile version of their website but, for example, Abduzeedo doesn’t and when I tried to reach it with my mobile phone it jammed it with too many images, javascript and information that I didn’t want to see.
WordPress Mobile Pack plugin will help you adapt your WordPress site to mobile browsers and not just iPhones.
Again you can do a specific CSS stylesheet for the effect but the plugin covers that very well.
Speed up your website
How often do you visit websites and when they take too long to load their content you simple leave them? This is common on websites that are hosted on shared servers and have a considerable amount of traffic.
When someone visits your site or blog the server gets requests to display everything on that page. When you have a site with heavy images or simple allot of images it’s normal that page loading time takes longer than it should.
Fortunately for WordPress powered sites there’s WP Super Cache that will cache the pages making the loading time faster thus improving user experience on your website.
For small websites or pages with little content or not so rich in images you might not notice much difference.
Give users a quick navigational reference with a Sitemap
Usually when you speak about sitemaps on WordPress you are refering to XML Sitemaps for Google Webmaster Tools, Bing’s Webmaster Central, etc. In this case I am speaking of a page with a reference to existing links on your website.
This is important for 2 primary reasons:
- Users have a quick reference to categories, pages and posts separated by category
- Search engine robots have a place to crawl to your posts thus indexing more pages for your website
There are many plugins to create sitemaps on WordPress. Personally I recommend Sitemap Generator WordPress plugin for this effect.
