Blake Imeson *Innovatrepreneur

Plugins

Plugins for Aesthetics

Highlight Author Comments Good way to draw attention to the author’s responses to user comments. (Example)

SocioFluid Adds social bookmarking icons to each post. Adds a Mac like effect when hovering over them. Alternative is Sociable.

WP-Cumulus Flash based tag cloud that can be changed in color and movement.

cforms An amazingly extensible form manager for making contact forms, intake forms and any other forms you can think of.

Favicon Manager Easily add a favicon to the site and to feeds. Favicons > Here is a site to make your own favicon.

Plugins for Usability

Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu This is a great plugin that changes the WordPress backend navigation to a very fast drop down menu, Can customize colors too.

Page Management Dropdown This will put the pages into the dropdown navigation as seen above for quick access to edit pages. (as seen above)

Exclude Pages from Navigation Allows you to exclude select pages from the navigation menus. Good CMS functionality to create pages that have no automatically generated links to them.

pageMash Easily change the order of how pages are displayed in the navigation.

No Self Pings Stops WordPress from automatically sending trackbacks to posts you link to internally.

Plugins for SEO

All in One SEO Pack Allows you to change titles, descriptions and keywords for all posts/pages. A must for proper Search Engine Optimization.

Google Analytics for WordPress Lets you track how people got to the site, what they did while there and a whole host of other metrics. Google Analytics is free and very powerful.

Google XML Sitemaps Generates a new sitemap every time you change the site. Automatically notifies the major search engines of the change. Use in conjunction with Google Webmaster Tools.  Good for seeing SEO problems with your site.

SEO Slugs Removes the unnecessary words from the permalink slug. instead of the url being /the-ultimate-guide-for-wordpress it would change it to /ultimate-guide-wordpress This makes the URL more targeted for SEO.

Plugins for Efficiency

WP Super Cache If your site experience a lot of traffic this will keep your server from going down. It caches and serves static pages thus taking a huge load off the server,

WP-DBManager Repair, backup and optimize your WP database. It is a good idea to periodically backup your database. Know how to restore it in case it gets hacked or messed up.

Put a blank text file named index.html in the plugins folder. This will stop someone from going to /wp-content/plugins/ and being able to see all the plugins you have installed. This is a good security provision to avoid showing someone an exploit.

Configuring WordPress

General Settings

Change the blog title to something SEO friendly as this is the  default title for the blog. (Title can also be changed with All-In-One-SEO Plugin) Choose a tagline. Some themes display this, others do not. The WordPress URL is listed here, choose whether you want it to be http://yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com it doesn’t matter much, just be consistent and always link that way. Change time zone: -5 UTC is Eastern standard time.

Writing Settings

Choose default post category. Enable XML-RPC protocol to use blogging tools like Window’s Live Writer. It is a tool which I highly recommend. You can see what posts are going to look like before publishing them.

Reading Settings

Here you change what shows on the homepage - your posts or a static page. Change how many posts appear on the post page. Depending on the average length of your posts you probably shouldn’t have more than 10, Choose whether the full post is displayed on the post page or just a summary of each.

Discussion Settings

Define how people can comment and what makes a comment go into moderation. I always set it to have all comments held in moderation so spam doesn’t get posted. Set whether to display avatars. Some themes may not support this.

Media Settings

Set the default dimensions of thumbnails. Change the maximum image size to one that works well with your theme.

Privacy Settings

Here you can choose whether or not to let your blog be indexed by search engines. If you want visitors, you should allow the blog to be visible.

Permalink Settings

This is where you define what the URL syntax is for posts/pages by default it is .com/?p=123 which tells you nothing about the post and is horrible for SEO. Instead change it to something like /%postname%/ which will just append the post title and be .com/post-name There are also formats which have the date.  If you used Fantastico, this step should be automatic, if not you will have to update the .htaccess file manually. This is one of the most important settings to change!