for Real World Functionality and Usability
OK, so you know that we love WordPress for building new websites, and one of the reasons we do is that it is so extendable and customizable. There are literally thousands of plugins available for WordPress that add functionality or change the look-and-feel of your site, but which ones are our favorites? Well, here’s a short list…
Contact Form 7 — simple, easy-to-use custom contact form. Has CAPTCHA spam control, too!
WP Title 2 — this handy little plugin let’s you assign one (shorter) title for internal links and navigation, and a longer detailed title to help with Search Engine Optimization. How good is that? After spending a couple of hours going through one of our clients sites and changing page titles to longer, likely searched key phrases, we moved their ranking into the top 10 for appropriate searches. This is good. Really good.
vSlider – makes jQuery animated banners for your homepage that can be directed to link to individual pages and posts (or even outside URLs), And,unlike Flash banners, people can actually see them on their iPhones and iPads!
NextGen Gallery – create easy to manage galleries of thumbnail images that open as clickable slideshows.
Add-to-Any – gives you a button with drop-down menu (see below) that lets readers share your posts on various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Digg, or even send an email to a friend with the URL.
Google XML Sitemaps — gives you one button SEO help for your site … the easiest way to create a robot-searchable sitemap so search engines can better index your site.
Pretty Link — lets you create very short links to your URLs so you can tweet them in twitter without busting the 140-word rule. Once you create the short link, you can send to Twitter by clicking a button–sweet!
Font Burner – enables you to swap header text with a fancy display font from a collection of over a thousand cute, fun, serious, techno, messy and beyond typefaces.
MyBrand – swap out the standard WordPress Admin login screen with a custom version showing your company’s branding.
WP-DBManager – allows you to optimize and repair your WordPress database, and even lets you set-up automatic back-ups that are sent to your email address. This is a little boring, but very cool … look ma, no hands!
Read more about the cost benefits of using WordPress as your CMS solution.
