Underground Web Designs Blog

There are literally thousands of plugins for the popular blogging system Wordpress. If you need a feature Wordpress doesn’t have, chances are that there is a plugin for it. However, there are some plugins that are so useful that I believe every Wordpress based site should have them installed. In no particular order, here they are:

WP Super Cache

This plugin caches the pages of your blog as HTML files (instead of PHP scripts), saving server processing power. This plugin is a must for any site that expects lots of traffic, and can mean the difference between having a successful product launch or promotion and getting and “Site Unavailable” error. Even if you’re not expecting heaps of traffic quite yet this plugin should be installed and activated. After all, you never know when your site might show up on the front page of Digg or be Stumbled. Prevention is always the best cure.

Ultimate Google Analytics

The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin is one of the best plugins for adding Google Analytics Stat Tracking to a Wordpress blog. Not only does it add the required Javascript to every page of your blog without you having to touch any code, but it also lets you track outgoing links, download links, and mailto (email) links. The interface is easy to understand and the plugin requires absolutely no upkeep. Just set it, forget it, and watch your blog stats automagically show up in Google Analytics.

Akismet

Even the Wordpress.org guys think this is a vital plugin, which is why it’s included with every release of Wordpress! Askimet is without a doubt the best spam checker I’ve ever seen. You will need an account at Wordpress.org to use it, but that is free and easy to get. Once you have your account, log in, visit your account dashboard, and click the “Profile” link to get your API key. Paste that key into Askimet and your blog will never have a Spam comment again. Now if only they had a version that stopped e-mail spam as well…

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is another simple but powerful plugin. Once it’s added to your blog and activated, head over to the settings page and click the button to build your Sitemap for the first time. By default the Sitemap is located at http://www.yourblog.com/sitemap.xml, and contains a breakdown of all the pages, posts, etc. on your blog in a format search engines can easily understand. The plugin will also take charge of notifying the major search engines whenever you update your blog, helping to get your latest posts indexed all the faster.

Sociable

The sociable plugin helps spread the word about your blog by placing links to popular social networking sites at the bottom of each post. The plugin has options for almost 100 different sites, and has a slick interface that makes it easy to choose which links show up, and which order they are displayed in. The links displayed are small icons, which will stand out but won’t be overly distracting from the content of your site. The Sociable plugin also gives you lots of options about where the icons should be displayed and where they should not (pages, category listings, etc).

These 5 plugins should be at the very least installed on every Wordpress site. Each one is well maintained, easy to use, and incredibly useful. Maybe you won’t use all of them all of the time, but make them part of your default configuration for any new wordpress blog you set up and you can’t go wrong.

This is my list, I’m sure there are other “Must Have” plugins out there. If you have a plugin that you just can’t live without, post it in the comments, I would love to hear about it and possibly add it to my own Wordpress toolkit.

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For the curious, here is a list of plugins I’m currently using on this blog (besides all the ones listed above):

• Actionstream: Shows updates from activities across the web.
• Adsense Manager: Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours.
• Contacts List: Output microformatted blogroll links on a static page.
• Diso Profile: Detect and import hCard data on new user, extended data for user profiles, easy hCard generation 
• Feedburner Feedsmith: Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Micro Anywhere: Adds microformat buttons to the wordpress post and pages editor, letting you embed microformated data into your blog.
• Open ID: Allows the use of OpenID for account registration, authentication, and commenting. Also includes an OpenID provider which can turn WordPress author URLs into OpenIDs.
• Pictoformats: Supports @replies, #hashtags.
• wp-XRDS-Simple: Add XRDS information to your blog.
• zLinks: Provides a clickable icon for every post, comment and embedded link that leads to additional semantic Web and related data resources; also provides annotation capabilities.

This blog post starts with a confession: I haven’t been doing a very good job with this blog. In fact, I started it for all the wrong reasons. I started this blog because everyone always said that blogs were great ways to drive traffic to a website, and that every online business should have one. Well, it’s true that blogs can be good for business, but it is not true that every online business should have a blog.

You see, a blog is only good if you write about things you’re passionate about — if you really believe in your message. If you start a blog and write about a topic just because you want to reach a certain market; well, you won’t get very far. Your desire to post just won’t be there. Soon your blog will be just one of the hundreds of stale, unread blogs littering the internet today.

Case in point: This blog. I’ve been writing about stuff (or trying to write about stuff) small business owners can do to succeed online, drive traffic to their sites, etc. The problem is that I’m not a marketer, and I’m not a life coach. I’m a web developer. Marketing and coaching are not my interests, but building really cool websites that do amazing things is. 

So, here’s the deal. Starting today, I’m changing the focus of this blog. No more will it be about marketing, SEO, or internet strategies. Instead, I will be writing about breakthrough programming projects, amazing web designs, and neat new plugins. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a geek-only, code-in-every-post blog either. There are plenty of those. Instead, I will try to explain what’s going new and exciting in the tech end of the internet world in non-technical terms for everybody else.

Watch this space, new posts coming soon!

Dr. Peter Drucker said “What Gets Measured Gets Managed”, and this is nowhere more true than online. If you have any sort of a website and don’t have analytical software installed, you are missing a tremendous opportunity. How can you improve your website if you don’t know when (or even if!) people are visiting? How can you remove the bad and improve the good when you don’t even know what parts of your site people like best?

When it comes to your website, you are not a reliable resource for determining what is and isn’t working! You may like a specific page, post, or image, but that doesn’t mean everyone who sees your site will. In fact, chances are they wont! The only way to know for sure how visitors see your site is to get the information from them directly, and the easiest way to do this is through web analytics software.

I’m not going to get into the debate about which analytics software to use (there are many), I’m just going to recommend one: Google Analytics. I recommend Google Analytics for 2 reasons: Number 1: It’s free. All you need is a Google account, and chances are good you already have that. If you don’t, getting one is free. Number 2: it works. Google Analytics tracks lots of data, likely more than you’ll ever need, and it makes it quite easy to spot the trends. Setting up Google Analytics is easy too, just head over to www.google.com/analytics and follow the instructions to get an account and set up your website.

Google Analytics works by having you place one small snippet of code on each page of your website. This snippet then automatically collects information such as how many people visit your site, where they come from (search engines, other sites, or direct), how long they stay on your site, how many pages they visit, and much more.

After Google Analytics has been installed on your site for a week or so begin to look at the statistics it shows. Two of the most useful metrics are right on the Dashboard (home screen) by default: the “Traffic Sources Overview” and the “Content Overview”.

The Traffic Sources Overview box provides you with a breakdown of how people are finding your site. Are they mostly coming to it directly (through bookmarks or by typing in your URL), or are they coming via Search Engines, or from links on other sites? Now you know! Clicking the “view reports” link at the bottom of the graph. This page will show you even more details. Here you can find which search engines and even which keywords send you the most traffic, which sites are linking to you (and how many people follow the links, and much more.

The other important metric is the “Content Overview” box on the Analytics dashboard. This box shows a list of the pages on your site that are getting the most traffic, as well as by how much. This makes it easy to see if there is one or two pages that generate the most interest on your site. Knowing what you’re doing right is the first step to improving any website!

The important thing to realize about Google Analytics is that it offers a tremendous amount of information… I’ve only talked about two of it’s many reporting features. As great as this variety is, it can also lead to “Paralysis by Analysis” if you’re not careful. Don’t spend so much time looking at the statistics and analyzing every last detail that you fail to improve and add to your site. No matter how much information you have, if you do not act on it then that data is worthless.