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5 Essential WordPress Plugins to Spark Your Design Blog

5 essential wordpress plugins

Written by Blake McCreary on Sep 06, 2009 | View Comments Comments

As many readers have probably figured out I use WordPress to power my website.  The great thing about WordPress is the amount of plugins available through the extension on WordPress.com. While plugins are fantastic for adding more features and functionality to your blog site they can also have a negative side effect if you pile up to many. The list of plugins I’ve put together below are good to use for just about anyone looking to improve their WordPress blog site. Of course, there are many more plugins available but these will get you off to a solid start.

1. Google Sitemap Generator

The Google Sitemap Generator is a plugin that will generate a fresh XML sitemap every time you update your wordpress content.

What is a Sitemap?

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

2. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack is an essential WordPress search engine optimization plugin that will help setup your blog so that search engines can drive traffic to your website based on the unique content of each page or post. Note: You will need to input the meta information on each page. If you are not quite sure how to configure the plugin you can check out this tutorial by Michael Pick on Tubetorial.com

3. Possibly Related Recent Posts

The Possibly Related Recent Posts plugin is a great tool for hooking your readers into articles similar to what they are already reading. I have my possibly related links appear directly under articles so when they will be more likely to click them. The link list is automatically generated on the fly by recency and the categories the current post is in. Does not use tags.

4. Contact Forms

The CForms II plugin makes it easy to create contact forms for your blog. The plugin has excellent styling capabilities so that you can create a form that matches your blog’s design.

Note: This is a very nice plugin with a lot of customization options, however, I did have issues at one point with the ajax compatibility which made the forms malfunction. Not sure if it was perhaps a bug or what. I kept getting the “One moment please…” message. The problem was resolved by disabling ajax on each individual form’s settings. Quick fix. I will continue to use CForms II unless I can find something better. At that point I will edit this post.

5. Disqus Comments

Many bloggers will use comment systems that function only within their own blog site. I’m not opposed to it but I like the Disqus Commenting system because of the versatility is provides for members of the Disqus community. Rather than forcing readers to sign up for a brand new account at every blog, Disqus allows its users to maintain one account which can be used to comment on any blog that uses Disqus. Disqus also informs commentors when someone replies to a thread they are partipating on unlike the default commenting system. You would normally require a plugin like Subscribe to Comments.

Thanks for reading and I do realize that there are many more plugins which are useful for WordPress bloggers. I couldn’t possibly name them all but I think these will cover most everyone who wants to start a blog with a minimal amount of plugins.

The Author of this post is Blake McCreary

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  • saad

    Can you tell me which bookmark plugin are u using? in the bottom of footer.i.e sharing is sexy

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    It's the Sexy Bookmarks plugin. You can find it here. http://sexybookmarks.net/

    Soon I will likely do a follow up of more useful plugins.

  • saad

    Can you tell me which bookmark plugin are u using? in the bottom of footer.i.e sharing is sexy

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    It's the Sexy Bookmarks plugin. You can find it here. http://sexybookmarks.net/

    Soon I will likely do a follow up of more useful plugins.

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  • http://www.worxpro.com/ Ananta Saurabh

    cool, i agree, may be wordpress thinks of including these plugins as defualt from the next release ;)

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    haha yea you would think SEO and an XML sitemap would be something everyone needs..

  • http://www.worxpro.com/ Ananta Saurabh

    cool, i agree, may be wordpress thinks of including these plugins as defualt from the next release ;)

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    haha yea you would think SEO and an XML sitemap would be something everyone needs..

  • mspillowz

    Hi, nice blog! Can you tell me about your footer. It is really neat and pretty simple.

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    Sure. Its a plugin called Wibiya Toolbar. You have to apply for it or receive an invite since its still in beta I think. Make sure you have a solid design and content before you apply or else you may be denied. http://wibiya.com/. Thanks for reading!

  • mspillowz

    Hi, nice blog! Can you tell me about your footer. It is really neat and pretty simple.

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    Sure. Its a plugin called Wibiya Toolbar. You have to apply for it or receive an invite since its still in beta I think. Make sure you have a solid design and content before you apply or else you may be denied. http://wibiya.com/. Thanks for reading!

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    Sure. Its a plugin called Wibiya Toolbar. You have to apply for it or receive an invite since its still in beta I think. Make sure you have a solid design and content before you apply or else you may be denied. http://wibiya.com/. Thanks for reading!

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    Sure. Its a plugin called Wibiya Toolbar. You have to apply for it or receive an invite since its still in beta I think. Make sure you have a solid design and content before you apply or else you may be denied. http://wibiya.com/. Thanks for reading!

  • mspillowz

    Thanks!

  • mspillowz

    Thanks!

  • http://www.kloxet.com/13.html women's shoes

    For some reason google can't recognised my site sitemap. Do you know of any sitemap creator tools?

  • http://www.kloxet.com/13.html women's shoes

    For some reason google can't recognised my site sitemap. Do you know of any sitemap creator tools?

  • http://twitter.com/saadbassi saadbassi

    You can use google xml-sitemap.You can download it from here
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-site...

  • http://www.kloxet.com/13.html women's shoes

    For some reason google can't recognised my site sitemap. Do you know of any sitemap creator tools?

  • http://www.kloxet.com/13.html women's shoes

    For some reason google can't recognised my site sitemap. Do you know of any sitemap creator tools?

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    Are you using html only or a cms system? You may need to add your site to your google webmaster tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en. Robot text may be factor but I'm not sure. This is a good topic. I may do some research on it and post and article.

  • http://twitter.com/saadbassi saadbassi

    You can use google xml-sitemap.You can download it from here
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-site...

  • http://www.blakemccreary.com Blake McCreary

    Are you using html only or a cms system? You may need to add your site to your google webmaster tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en. Robot text may be factor but I'm not sure. This is a good topic. I may do some research on it and post and article.

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