Spark User Engagement on your WordPress blog with Highlighter
The name of the game in today’s online marketing is user engagement. Paying close attention to the interaction development state of the design process is a great start; but user engagement doesn’t stop here. If you run a blog, adding commenting and social networking features can harness great conversations between you and your readers but traditional blog interaction methods suffers from poor interactions.
Highlighter, a new free WordPress plugin released earlier this week brings good news to all WordPress blog owners who are keen in improving their visitors’ experience and get them more engaged. It is bundled with very useful features for expanding your user’s options to share and comment on inline content:
1) Commenting by highlighting text – Users don’t need to comment at the end of the post, they can do so as they read and their comments get attached to the text they selected. These comments appear at the end of the post, too, but by giving the users this new option, you are making your ‘conversation’ with them even more tangible.
2) Sharing by highlighting text – Social networking will be specially simplified with the help of this plugin since the need of copying and pasting selected parts of your content into, for example, Twitter, will be faster and more efficiently done. Highlighter will automatically fill out a new social network post with the phrase that has been highlighted and the URL of the web page it came from.
Inline commenting feature of Highlighter
You can watch the video at the project’s website for more detailed information on how to install and customize Highlighter.
Aside from the plethora of features, Highlighter could actually replace the need for other social media plugins and simplify the look of your user interface overall. It will, of course, depend on your personal needs, but one thing is for sure: the conversation happening between you and your readers will be far more insightful and valuable, and it’ll come closer to being a real conversation after all.
About the Author
Pamela Dominguez is a 24-year-old interaction and interface designer located in the city of Monterrey, México. Currently working full-time for a user experience consultancy, she also runs a daily-updated personal blog. You can contact her through Twitter and view her LinkedIn profile.
November 5th, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Very cool plugin!
February 10th, 2011 at 12:47 am
Yeah… In fact all there is about it is coolness. And that’s all. The part with Twitter and Facebook is redundant, nothing new, interesting or to make something out of it, and the link/logo to highlighter. com is quite annoying.
I admit I’m a fan of tiny logos on free stuff (of that stuff is really good, everyone will click on the logo) or no logo at all, but all this coolness with nothing to back it up just seems waste of my visitor’s time, resources and – possible – a reason for trouble with other plugins.