Starting a Wordpress blog? Use plugins

Starting a WordPress blog? Use plugins

Jamie Zoch 26 Feb 2009 Domain Help

Many people install and use the very powerful blog platform WordPress but they also do not add what is needed to make the new blog even more powerful.

WordPress is great, but adding plugins make it AMAZING! WordPress IMO is one of the best style sites for SEO, the fastest and easiest to set up and use as well.

Having everything in place, you can realistically have your site up and running in an hour or less.

What do you need? I highly suggest you use your own Domain Name. Do not use a subdomain off wordpress.com like yourname.wordpress.com . Once you have purchased the best best domain name you can afford to match your sites meaning, the next thing you need is Hosting. I use HostGator.com simply because they are cheap ($9.95/mo baby plan) and they have an "auto install" for WordPress and they are reliable.

You can see my write-up on How To Install a WordPress Blog here which is very helpful if you never installed one before, or never used hosting or FTP.

After you have your blog installed on your hosting, using FTP you want to install plugins which give you further options to use on your site and on the backend. The following are Must Have plugins for any WordPress blog and ones that I use. All are very easy to install (covered in the how to link above as well) and most after installing via FTP, you simply visit the Plugins/Installed on your WP backend and click Activate.

Here is the main directory of WordPress plugins which will allow you to search for Any kind of plugin you may need as well.

Must have Plugins that I use:

FCKeditor: This replaces the standard editor in WordPress. This plugin is Sweet!

PageLinksTo: This allows you to direct link "page" tabs to a specific web page outside of your blog. (visit the Expiring Domains tab here on DotWeekly)

TwitterTools: Allows instant new blog post directly to your twitter account.

Sociable: Put’s social networking buttons at the bottom of your posts for easy Digg, Facebook "digging".

Headspace2: Great SEO tool which allows provides an all-in-one meta-data manager.

Subscribe To Comments: This allows your readers to "follow" any comments that they write in. This helps keep your comment section exciting, as many debates take place in the comment section.

Those are the 6 plugins that I include in every WordPress blog that I create. After you download them and unzip, create a folder on your computer and save those 6 in that folder. Any time you install a new WP blog, it will be very easy to send them to the new blog via FTP.

I also do this with WP free theme’s that I come across. Some free theme sites I like to search are: ThemeLab.com, Here and Here. Simply download, unzip and FTP them to the Theme folder for your site. Using the "Appearance" tab in your WP backend, you select Themes and can change to a new theme anytime.

I’m sure there are many more great plugins you may want, but these are the main ones I use for Every WP site I put up. Again, you can use the link above for the main directory right from WP and search for specific plugins you may need.

If you have some Plugins you really enjoy, please do share them and what the plugins are for.

Patrick McDermott

Feb 26, 2009

“Those are the 6 plugins that I include in every WordPress blog that I create.”

Jamie,

Barry over at PredictiveDomaining.com suggests using WordPress MU if you’re going to create lots of sites.

Quote: “For mini-websites, I use WordPress MU if I am keeping them for income. This way I can update the software once because multiple sites can be on one installation. It saves a lot of time during updates and when adding new websites.”

See here:
http://sn.im/WordpressMU

What do you think of that suggestion?

domain name

Feb 27, 2009

good info…

Kevin

Mar 01, 2009

Recently, I added WordPress.com Stats and it gives you some information that you don’t get from Google Analytics. Specifically, I can track day-by-day how people arrived at my site. Google Analytics doesn’t break this down enough for me.

Thanks for the list of plug-ins you find useful!
Its almost impossible to search through all that exist and predict which ones will really be critical.

Jack Clarke

Mar 03, 2009

Right now I have 19 active plugins and 3 more currently disabled. Plus 4 or 5 widgets. Just wondering, can too many plugins cause any problems? So far I have had nothing but a posotive blogging experience since moving from Blogger.