Web 2.0 is all about the conversation, and much of that conversation comes from letting visitors comment on your site’s articles and pages. But much of that technology has been so far reserved for blogs or sites that have been programmed to allow comments. What about your lonely little static web site that you lovingly built with just plain old HTML? How can you let users join the conversation and place comments on your site’s pages, WITHOUT having to be a code monkey to do it?

Luckily, the web contains millions of brilliant ideas, and there are people who have already designed dead-easy systems for you to use to add commenting to your sites. Here are four to choose from, with pros and cons of each.

Instant Site Comments – Although this one isn’t free, the advantages of using this one makes the low price of $67 inconsequential. The main advantage of this script is that it is YOUR script. It resides on your server, and doesn’t rely on someone else’s site to be functional. Any time you use a script that relies on someone else’s web server being up and running, you run the risk of having your site go down every time THEIR site goes down. And since this script can be used on all your sites, without having to pay more money for each one, it really is worth it.

JS-Kit Comments – If you really want free, and don’t mind relying on someone else’s server being up and running, then this would be my choice. With just one line of code, you’ve got a commenting system. It’s got a great list of features, and is being used on quite a few sites, so it’s working well for others. It’s powerful on its own, but can even be integrated with their Reviews and Ratings products. Definitely a good choice, with the one possible drawback of it not being solely reliant on your own hosting.

Personally, I would choose one of the above, but here are two more that you may want to at least consider. I don’t have enough experience with either of them to make any recommendations, but they sound ok. You decide. (Both rely on their respective hosting services, so the same caution applies as with JS-Kit).

iComments – This one uses iframes, which I normally wouldn’t ever recommend using, however there are special cases in which this might be necessary for you. If your site resides on a free web hosting server or any server that doesn’t give you PHP support, then you may need to use this type of program.

Instacomment – This one uses a little chicklet (small graphic icon) to open and close comments on pages. I’m not crazy about that concept, but if you are, well then, here you go.

If you’ve been wanting to launch your old, static site into the conversation of the Web 2.0 world, by allowing comments (and fresh, user-generated content), one of the above solutions should work great for you. And frankly, they just couldn’t be much easier to implement, so have fun!

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