Noted: A really sound, sensible and practical article on adding all sorts of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ services to your WordPress powered website. Always better to code stuff on your own site rather than use a plugin.

Can’t say I agree with the premise, though:

Integrating social media services in your website design is vital if you want to make it easy for readers to share your content.

Displaying your latest tweets is a good way to encourage people to follow you on Twitter. The most common place to display tweets is in the sidebar, although you can add them to any area of the website.

All this extra stuff around your content is noise. People come to your site in order to find something out or for some entertainment. If they want to share your article on Facebook or Twitter it’s really not difficult to copy the URL and paste it into a box.

Do you ever use share links?

If people want to see your tweets they’ll look at your Twitter stream. Besides, a list of half conversations isn’t particularly interesting.

Adding a comment to an article is child’s play.

Make the reading process as easy and painless as possible. Honour the words by cutting out the distractions.