WordPress – the best plugins, themes, training and SEO to create an efficient website

WordPress  – the best plugins, code, themes advice and tips and tricks to create a stunning website with CMS

Advice and tutorials

• Training on how to design and build a website using WordPress | Provided by the makers of WordPress.
• Integrating WordPress with Your Website « WordPress Codex | How to add a WordPress blog to your existing website.
• WordPress › Support » How to change line spacing? | Very useful guide. Changing the line spacing (leading) can radically alter the appearance and readability of your blog.
• David – Adding the image tag to WordPress’s rss headers | Improve your SEO and the effectiveness of your feed.
• Managing Your WordPress Database | How to efficiently manage your mysql database in WordPress.
• WordPress.com SEO | Yoast’s famous guide, and probably the only one worth reading.
• How to enable user registration and logins in WordPress | How to open up your blog to user participation.
• How to create pages which require a login in WordPress | How to create passworded areas in WordPress.

Themes

• Woothemes are very reliable, very robust and offer a number of free themes. There’s also WooCommerce – which is a really easy to implement and powerful e-commerce solution.
• Modularity Lite — WordPress.com | A great low profile easy to customise free theme.
  

  WordPress Logo (Photo credit: Phil Oakley)

• WordPress › Delicate « Free WordPress Themes
• WordPress › ColorWay « Free WordPress Themes
• WordPress › Brightpage « Free WordPress Themes
• DynamiX – Premium WordPress Theme Preview – ThemeForest
• Fenix – a great photography theme | Great for high impact images.
• Echoes – a lightweight and efficient photography / portfolio theme

WordPress.com compatible themes

• Delicious Theme | Set up for food, but would work well with any news/magazine content.
• Mystique Theme | Easy to set up and very simple to customise.

A good set of ‘core’ plugins for an efficient WordPress site

• Advanced Excerpt | Control all aspects of your excerpts – within the blog and in the feeds. Get around the default 55 word length.
• Akismet| This plugin eats spam for breakfast.
  

  Image via CrunchBase

• BM Custom Login | Customise the login screen – add a company logo.
• Compfight – a plugin which auto suggests creative commons and free to use images based on the post/page content and/or tags/keywords. The plugin automatically inserts the correct attribution for the copyright license. This can be custom styled for your theme. This plugin tends to pick more attractive images than Zemanta – due to better sources, and in particular use of the Flickr API.
• Contact Form 7 | The best and most powerful contact form for WordPress.
• Cookillian | Comply with the recent EU cookie directive law with this WordPress customizable plugin. Needs php 5.3 or higher.
• Different Posts Per Page | Control the number of posts displayed on the homepage, archives pages, category pages and tag pages.
• Jetpack by WordPress.com | Stats, sharing, forms, spelling & grammar checker, backup, maths symbols, sidebar widgets and real time distribution. Bring the best of WordPress.com to your WordPress.org website.
• Fancybox for WordPress | Great free image zoom and popup plugin.
• Google sitemap generator | Automatically create sitemaps an submit to Google.
• Page Links To | Create automatic in site SEO links.
• Postie | Set up email posting to your blog for all your website’s users.
• SEO Friendly images | Improve the SEO of your website by adding useful data to every image.
• Simple Facebook Connect | Allow users to connect to your site via Facebook.
• Smart YouTube | Add shortcodes for common Youtube viewing possibilities.
• Theme Test Drive | Try out your theme – in it’s entirety – before you activate.
• TubePress | Showcase your videos in a customizable portfolio format.
• W3 Total Cache | Possibly the best and quickest caching plugin. Supercharge your website’s load time.
• WordPress.com Popular Posts | Add a sitebar widget to display your site’s most popular posts. Automatically updates.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast or Platinum SEO pack | The two best SEO packages for WordPress. The one by Yoast is the best – it allows you to concentrate on writing content first, then fine-tuning SEO afterwards, keeping your content ‘natural’ and the way Google likes it.
• WP Audio Player | Simple and efficient html5 sound player. Handles multiple files and ipads.
• WP-DBManager | Vastly improve the efficiently of your site’s performance and automatically optimise and backup your database.
• WP Customer Reviews | Allow your website visitors to add reviews. The star ratings and a snippet will be picked up by Google improving your SERP.
• WP Page Navi | Improve the appearance of page / post navigation at the bottom of the posts screen. Add numbers. Customizable.
• WP Smush.it | Made by Yahoo this plugin strips out any unncessary data from image files and reduced the file size automatically without resulting in any loss of image quality.
• WP Table Reloaded | Make well designed tables easy in WordPress.
• Zemanta | This plugin suggests free to use content, links and images for your blogs.

Useful Plugins and addons

• Apple style slideout feedback or contact form | Stylish and simple contact / information form.
• Monitor your users’ activity and prevent hacking attacks | Keep an eye on suspicious activity on your website.
• Create social bookmarking and sharing buttons – wide short codes | Improve your SERP with social bookmarking.
• Improve the WordPress editor with a feel more like windows live writer. | Add wordprocessor functionality to the WordPress post and page editor.
• Install a private messaging system in WordPress | Add IM style functionality to your website for your users.
• Make improvements to your admin bar with this plugin | Lots of useful addons for your admin and user dashboards.
• Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin for WordPress | Improve your theme’s sidebar navigation.
• SevenSpark Labs – UberMenu – Responsive Mega Menu WP Plugin | Great way of implementing large and complicated menus in an easy to follow format.
• Styles with Shortcodes for WordPress Preview – CodeCanyon | Better columns, tables, quotes and accordian tabs.
• Plugins – Menu Management Enhancer for WordPress | CodeCanyon | Manage multiple menus in WordPress.
• PBK Mega Menu for WordPress Preview – CodeCanyon | An alternative to Ubermenu. Slightly easier to impliment.
• WordPress › Geolocation « WordPress Plugins | Add map data to your site. Improve your Google local ranking.
• Titus Bicknell » WordPress Plugin: RSS in Page | Add RSS feeds within a WordPress page.
• WordPress › Photo Galleria « WordPress Plugins | A great photo gallery plugin.
• All in one event calendar system for WordPress plugin | Fantastic calendaring and events system for your WordPress website.
• WordPress backup scheduler | Automatically schedule complete backups of your website to FTP or a cloud source.
• Wibya bar plugin | A great way to add social media functionality to your WordPress site.

Code and tools

• HTML Color Picker – find the HTML colour code for your desired colour scheme.
• UI Cloud – find creative commons and free to use buttons, elements, drop downs, menus, scripts, progress bars, calendars and much more.

Tom Tolkien has been designing website for over 10 years. If you require website design, development or repairs or customisations carried out to your existing website, please contact him via this website or Linkedin. Based in Yorkshire – on site visits are also possible – see rates here. Tom Tolkien can also be hired on PeoplePerHour by clicking here.

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