Your WordPress-based website is developed and installed. Everything is great and exciting, excepting one thing - spam in comments. How to administer it?

Why Spammers Like WordPress-Powered Websites
The first reason is WordPress’ ubiquity: today WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) on the Internet. Secondly, WordPress code and structure are well-known: it is a thoroughly documented open-source project, there are a lot of good tutorials and guides. Thirdly, some of WordPress peculiarities make it quite simple to automate placing spammy comments.

As a result, WordPress based websites are an attractive target for spammers. Inexpensive spam-sending software makes the problem even worse.

How to Disable Comments
The first anti-spam recipe is simple and categorical: Disallow comments. Just log in as an admin and find the menu item Settings > Discussion in the WordPress dashboard. At the top of the Discussion Settings page you can see an option that allows you to stop posting comments on new articles.
 
How to Monitor Comments
Truth be told, I agree with Wikipedia that blocking comments is not the best way, especially for blogs: "Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites." Moreover, when a blog post has new comments it is a good sign for visitors and Google that the post may be worth reading and ranking higher.

So, if you decide to allow commenting but don't want to turn your website into a trash dump, you have to administer your website comments.

Read more on
WordPress Spam Protection for Beginners

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This is the next seasonal round-up of web design articles and posts written by the design community and retweeted on @htmlcut during the winter 2011-2012.

This time among the most interesting sections are “Usability and User Experience”, “Forms”, “E-Commerce”, “Mobile Websites and Responsive Web Design”, “Trends” and “Opinions”. Frankly, all sections are instructive and informative and include lots of useful examples, guides and tips, so we strongly recommend to look through all of them.

• Web Design Principles and Basics
• Website Layout
• Psychology and Web Design
• Colors in Web Design
• Usability and User Experience
• Accessibility
• Cross Cultural Web Design
• Redesign
• Content and Copywriting
• Copyright
• Typography
• Navigation and Menus
• Landing Page and Conversion Rate
• Call to Action
• Forms
• Footers and Headers
• Tips and Recommendations
• E-Commerce Websites
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Mobile Websites and Responsive Web Design
• Website Technical Aspects
• Freelance
• Trends
• Opinions
• Inpiration and Creativity