Underground Web Designs Blog

Plug It In!

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.

• 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.

Most small business owners don’t see the point in having a blog. Heck, most small business owners don’t even have a website. They know they should, they’ve just never gotten around to it. Usually having a blog of their own hasn’t even crossed their mind. But every small business owner should have a blog, and here are 5 powerful reasons why:

1. Traffic, customers, leads, clients, etc. Whatever you call people who do business with you, having a blog will bring you more of them if you do it well. As a blogger you have a chance to write to the largest audience the world has ever known, in a way that they can find YOU. If done correctly a blog can build you a following of people who believe in you and what you do. This following will do almost anything you tell them too… and will most certainly buy anything you sell them.
2. Interaction. Remember that group of people who follow your blog and are interested in what you do? Well, ask them questions and improve your product. Who says you have to pay a big company to do market research? Here is a group of people that has found and followed you — they’re interested enough in what you do to act. Now ask them questions! Ask about your products, your business model, what they think you could be doing better. Then do it. One of the surest ways to success is to do what your market wants.
3. It’s free. Everybody likes free advertising right? Besides a bit of your time to write in it, Blogging is free. Anybody can have a simple Blogger blog set up in about an hour, and then you’re ready to go. If you have a website even better… your web master can set up a Wordpress blog for you in about 15 minutes.
4. The blog itself can make you money. Once you have been blogging for a couple of months and are beginning to get decent traffic, put Google Adsense on it. It’s not hard, and you can soon be making  some extra money from the traffic your blog draws. At the very least it will soon pay for the time you spend blogging.
5. It’s easy. It takes maybe half an hour a day to write a blog — and that’s if you do it every day. Once you’ve gotten going writing every couple of days is still plenty. When you consider the huge benefits that blogging can have for your business, how can you afford NOT to blog?

The most important thing that most people miss about blogging is that it doesn’t have to be work. Write about what you’re passionate about, what you believe in. We all have things we’d like to share with the world, a blog is your chance to actually do it. And if it benefits your business and makes you some money on the side, who’s complaining right?