I’ve been blogging for almost a year now. While my blog may not be as successful as some, I see it as a success simply because I’m still here doing it and folks are reading it!
Along the way, I’ve tuned up, re-themed, reformatted and redesigned my blog more than a couple of times, trying to find what will work for me the best in the form of widgets, plugins and themes. I feel like I have it just about where I want it….until of course I run across newer and better widgets and stuff!
In the meantime, I thought it might be worthwhile to share what is working for me, in the hopes that maybe a few of you can also benefit from my trials, and of course, errors.
Theme -
The theme I first started off with, as we all probably do, is the very plain-jane default WordPress theme (or at least it was the default theme prior to the release of 3.0 and the new Twenty-ten default theme. I quickly realized that this was just far too limiting for my over-active brain, so I quickly switched to Panorama.
Panorama allowed me some flexibility in that I could upload a custom header image, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with the background. Their choice of colors wasn’t satisfactory and at the time, wading through all that code was still a little above my capabilities. Before long, I figured out how to get through the code enough that I could change the colors in the navigation and such, but I still couldn’t master the background issue. I started searching around and discovered another theme, Expressivo.
Finally, not only could I change the background color, but I could use an image as well, so I threw up my bulletin board background image, in order to keep some consistency with my graphic design website. Expressivo also provides some other easy customization features such as the font, without going into the code. By this time however, I’d played around with the code enough to make many more changes to the theme to try to make it more resemble my main website, however I still wasn’t totally satisfied. With the release of the new 2010 theme, in particular the Weaver child theme, however, I think I’m set for awhile. This theme is highly customizable without going into the code, which just simplifies things all the way around. Eventually, I’ll have figured out how to create my own theme, so that it will match my website exactly, but I digress.
Widgets -
These are designed to be dragged into the sidebar and provide information and gadgets to your visitors.
Subscribe Widget – Use your own title; displays icons and allows you to set icon size, and customize your RSS, Comments RSS, Facebook, Twitter and Feedburner settings.
Text Widget – I use six of these in my sidebars, for newsletter sign up, RSS by email sign up, linking to my main website, displaying my Amazon.com affiliate widget, my Facebook Fan Page badge, and signing up for my Client Worksheet guide. You can use them for just about anything and a little HTML goes a long way here!
Recent Posts - Kind of self explanatory, this displays my 5 most recent posts on my blog, for at-a-glance reference for my visitors.
Categories - This is a list of all the categories I have placed my posts in, so that if a visitor is interested in a specific topic, they can find everything I have written on that particular topic.
On the home page of my blog, I also display the Archives widget, Facebook Networked Blogs widget, and another text widget for a Google Adsense ad. This secondary sidebar however, is only on the home page so these features don’t appear on subsequent pages and posts (another feature of Expressivo that I liked).
Other widgets that are typically available by default are Pages, Links (blogroll), Calendar (displays a calendar showing dates of your posts), and Tag Cloud (shows the most used tags from your posts, in different font sizes, to indicate which tags see more action). I’ve chosen not to use these for now.
Plugins -
Most, if not all of these are available at http://wordpress.org/extend.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs. I place mine at the bottom of every post.
Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.
All in One SEO Pack - SEO for your WordPress blog. You can put your post title, description and keywords in at the bottom of every post for optimum SEO. (Also, be sure and read my SEO tips!)
Bad Behavior – Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. This has really cut down on the amount of spam that makes it into my comments.
Comment Reply Notification - When a reply is made to a comment the user has left on the blog, an e-mail shall be sent to the user to notify him of the reply. This will allow the users to follow up the comment and expand the conversation if desired.
Contact Form 7 – Simple but flexible contact form plugin.
Do Follow – Removes the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments.
FeedBurner FeedSmith – 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.
Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
NextGEN Gallery – A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.
Post-to-Facebook – Provides the ability to quickly post a blog item to your facebook mini feed.
RSS Remind – Remind your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. I place this at the bottom of every post, just for extra visibility.
Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
Subscribe widget – Adds a subscribe widget to the sidebar (mentioned above in the Widgets section).
TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.
WordPress Gravatars - Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section. Uses the comment authors email to display their Gravatar. It also gives the user an Author Profile picture, based on his or hers Gravatar.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.
There you have it! What are your favorite widgets and plugins? Any great ones that you’re sure I can’t live without? Let me know, because I love having the latest and greatest!
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the useful content you presented do help my investigation for our group, appreaciate that.
hi everybody
just registered and put on my todo list
hopefully this is just what im looking for, looks like i have a lot to read Im trying to find a way to build an e-mail list.