The forth in a 5-part series, together we will add new features and functionality to your blog by finding and installing plugins. You should have chosen a host, installed wordpress by following the steps in our featured video, and chosen a theme you like.
Start by exploring the wordpress plugins directory. With 6,153 plugins, and increasing every day, there are possibly too many to choose from. You can select the most popular, newest or choose from 13 categories. You can do almost anything you can imagine with plugins from creating visitor polls to twitter widgets and of course, a large selection of more functional features, such as SEO optimisation or data and traffic collection statistics.
There are a few recommended plugins you really should install. Spam protection is necessary, unless you want to be inundated with automated comment ‘bots’ leaving nonsense comments for approval. By default, comments will need your approval. Go on-leave for 2 weeks and you could come back to hundreds of them!
Akismet is a good spam detector. It checks your comments against the web service and lets you review the spam it catches. The only problem with akismet is it needs a wordpress.com API key. For simple steps on how to get the API key and use it to activate akismet, read the short tutorial from solidblogger.
Other must-have plugins are SEO tools. Although wordpress is search engine friendly, it needs a little tweaking out-of-the-box. All-in-one-SEO will optimise your blog for the serach engines. And a google XML sitemap generator will help get the search engines crawling all the pages of your blog quickly and easily.
There are many useful contents tools. Adding images to your blog makes you look more professional, and there are lots of plugins to manage and find photos using flickr, which is probably the most popular photo sharing site on the web. You can find and download photos from flickr to add to your posts, but be careful to choose pictures the owner will allow you to use on your website. Other useful plugins can help you find and embed youtube videos and podcasts into your posts.
Traffic tools are another useful category of plugins. Plugins for tagging, which will help get your posts found and read, adding RSS feeds, ‘tweets’ from your twitter account and google analytics. Google analytics will help you discover how many visitors your blog gets, where they are coming from and which pages they like.
And for a few more ideas, here are a list of 12 must-have wordpress plugins from solidblogger.
