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I run a number of blogrolls and as I visit the sites that have requested that they be added to my various blogrolls – the do follow list, Green Thumb Sunday, I am Canadian Blogroll and the Toronto Bloggers blogroll just to name a few – I get a chance to examine the design and structure of a lot of blogs.

I must say, I get most frustrated when I’m looking at some of the sites that want to join the do follow blogroll because of course I have to check to see if their comments follow or not.

Here are a few things that make my job of checking sites a little more difficult:

A lot of links or ads where the comment link is located:

It’s very hard to find the comment link when it’s buried within a number of links requesting that visitors social bookmark the post.

If people can’t find the link to leave you a comment it’s no wonder that you have very few comments. Just think if the comment link was at the top of the post, or on it’s own line below the post how many more comments you’d get?

People that have their comments closed to registered members:

Well for one – if you want to be on the do follow blogroll you need to open your comments up so that your visitors can get a link that follows when they leave a comment.

A lot of people just wont sign up to leave a comment. Believe me, you’ll get a lot more comments if they are open to all.

Sites that have a few or several posts on the main page but no way of traveling through the site to see older posts:

Get some navigation on your site! If I like your site or if I’m searching for elusive comments so that I can clear your site for the do follow blogroll I want to be able to travel through your site easily.

If you have archives set up by date your visitors will have to click on a number of links just to read a few posts if you don’t post multiple times each day.

Give me a way to get to the single post page:

Some sites are set up so that you can click the title of the blog post and that will take you to the single page for that post where you can comment on the post. That’s great. I love sites that are set up that way.

My problem is with sites where you can only get into the post to leave a comment by clicking on the permanent link, if you can find it see my first point, or comment link.

On blogger sites sometimes clicking on the comment link takes you to the blogger comment form. I don’t always want that. It’s much nicer to read comments on your blog than on the blogger comment page. Especially if the comment form is a pop up that’s too small to show the whole comment. I’ve run into several of those lately and you can’t adjust the size so you can’t read the full comment.

My suggestion to all is for you to take a look at a few other blogs and compare the features on other blogs to the features on your own.

Is your site easy to navigate in a number of ways?

Are important things such as the ability to get to the comment area clearly visible so that your visitors can find them quickly and easily in order to tell you how much they love your post?

If your site doesn’t have some of the features that I’ve mentioned and you want them, but don’t know how to add them on your own do a Google search with the name of your blogging platform in the search term as well as what you want to learn how to do.

for example:

add navigation links to blogger blog?

I actually just used that search term and it brought up a lot of helpful results.

I believe that the easier your site is to navigate the longer a visitor might stay and the more likely it will be that they will take the time to leave a comment if your content is good. Test my theory, try it for yourself.

These instructions are for adding a blogroll to WordPress on your own domain. At this time we haven’t figured out how to add a blogroll to a wordpress.com blog, but it’s fairly easy to add one to WordPress that is hosted on your own domain.

To put the blogroll code on a single page:

Go to the USER section on your DASHBOARD, and scroll down the user page until you find an area called PERSONAL OPTIONS – this will be in the lower left. Un-check the box beside “Use the visual rich editor when writing” and save options. You will now be writing your page in plain text.

Go back to the writing section and select WRITE NEW PAGE.

Give your page a title and perhaps use an image that might be supplied with the blogroll code that you are about to add to your site. Adding an image will create a nice looking header above the list on your new blogroll page. You can also link the image that you use to the home url of the blogroll that you are adding.

Paste the blogroll code into the page. The blogroll code will not work if you are writing in Rich Text so please be sure that you have done the very first instruction that I listed and switched to plain text mode.

Save your page and check to make sure it’s working.

You could also put the code in your sidebar:

Go into your WP admin section and select PRESENTATION, then select theme editor and select the correct theme.

Once you have opened the theme that you are using, you’ll find that the theme is open to the CSS Stylesheet file but all the other files that belong to the theme will be listed on the right.

You want to select your SIDEBAR page.

Find an appropriate place in your sidebar for the blogroll code. You can put an image header above the blogroll if you like and then past the blogroll code into your sidebar. You may have to enclose the blogroll code with list tags < li > < / li > or < div > < / div > (no spaces between selected li or div codes, blogroll code should go in the middle of either of these codes. )

If you’ve posted the code in correctly you should have a new blogroll in your sidebar. If by chance the blogroll isn’t working go back and make sure that there are no spaces in the code. Usually the only space in the code is right after SRC.

I hope that you’ve found this information helpful.

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