What Does Your Comments Section Read?

Hi you all, hope all’s well with your marketing business, I’ve something to share today that I feel is necessary for a blog, especially one that is getting off the ground, although saying that once you do make the change it’s for the best and you’d never change it back.

I see other savvy bloggers do this all the time, especially if they’re starting a new blog.  So what is it? OK, It’s about the comments section after the article you’ve just posted, we all know it’s just below that article and more often than not it’s set to wordpress default.  The default reads [No Comments] or worse [Comments 0] with that big zero after it, I think it’s untidy and needs changed.

When you’re leaving a comment below you’ll see what I mean – Ha got you :-) I’m only joking, if you do feel the post was helpful, please feel free to comment, after all as it says (I Love Comments) So if you look at my comments section you’ll see what I mean and what I’ve changed it too.

I remember having a good look around when I was making comments on other blogs and discovered that a few blogs had this section changed to their own wording and it looked far more appealing.

Then I remember reading a blog post where I had landed on when doing my daily tours of blog commenting and low and behold someone had written a post about the ugliness of the comments section and how it put them off when they went to leave a comment, yip that big [Comments 0] or [No Comments] again, even though the post may have been a good post it just put this person off.

Since then I’ve found many a blog that has the same attitude towards the comments section, where they have posted their thoughts on it and they’re never good, they all say it’s not professional looking and for all it takes to change it would leave it more attractive to comment on.

Now I know what you’re thinking? How does one go about this when they’re not very well versed yet at changing coding on their blog.  Well we’ll cover that now and don’t be thinking it’s hard it’s not.  When you’re finished reading these steps you’ll have a little smile on your face saying was that it :-)

OK, first off sign into your admin panel and navigate to where it says [Appearance] click on it, when it opens the drop down sub menu click on where it say [Editor] this will take you to the main editing interface.  Usually on the right side depending on what you’re using,  it will say,

Main Index Template
(index.php)

Click on Main Index Template (index.php) and it will take you to that page.

Then press Ctlr and F on your computer, when the find bar shows up at the bottom type in comments and press enter.  When you’re in this section, just to be sure hover into the section and click your cursor, again to be sure you’re in the editing section, this will locate the comments section for you.  If you’re finding trouble locating it and the find bar which sometimes is a little sticky, scroll down to you find the comments section which looks like the code below in this post and you’ll be fine.

When you find it this is the code you’ll want to locate, yours may be a little different depending on your themes way it likes to code it, but they’ll be much similar.

<?php comments_popup_link(__(‘Comments (0)’),
(‘Comments (1_’), __(‘Comments (%)’)); ?>

These are the three “ways in which the default usually leaves them”

1. No Comments. Here it displays the words Comments (0)
2. One comment. Here it displays the words Comments (1)
3. The section where it says more than one comment, will be displayed in it’s Comments (%) where the % will be the number of comments over 1.

You can change these sections to whatever you choose, but remember and I cannot stress this enough remember to make a copy of the file you are changing first as a backup.

This is the example I used, feel free to copy it if you want.

<?php comments_popup_link(__(‘ I love comments,
want to make one?’), __(‘<strong>1</strong> Comment left. Want to make another?’)); ?>

Wasn’t that simply :-)

What I done here was:

1. I Changed Comments (0) to –> I love comments, want to make one?
2. I Changed Comments (1) to –> 1 comment left. Want to make another?
3. I Changed Comments (%) to –> % Comments left. Want to make another?

The above is what I used, you can change the text to whatever you like, go on give it a try.

If you have any trouble, let me know and I’ll try and help out.

Till next time,

Eamon Diamond


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