Design Meme

Wordpress is a great tool for blogging—it’s easy to setup, the interface makes it easy to use, and there are tons of plugins you can download to add new features. Unfortunately when you’re just getting started with Wordpress, the sheer number of plugins can make it hard to know which ones to start with.

After more than a little trial and error and a lot of looking at discussions of other people’s favourite plugins, I’ve found 11 that seem to stand above the rest. Here are my suggestions for the 11 plugins you should consider adding to your blog.

1. Adsense-Deluxe
   Place Google AdSense ads in your posts, or as part of your template. This plugin ensures you do not have more than 3 ads displayed at once—part of Google’s terms of use.
2. del.icio.us – Bookmark this!
   This plugin lets you easily add a “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link to your blog or individual articles. Del.icio.us is a personal favourite, and a great way to save, organize and find new links.
3. Digg This
   Detects if one of your articles has been linked on digg.com and adds a link to the entry. This might not be as useful for blogs that are unlikely to ever be bookmarked there—but for me it’s a nice find.
4. Google Sitemaps
   This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Having a Google sitemap can help keep your site as up-to-date in Google’s indexes as possible.
5. Feedburner Feed Replacement
   Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner.com so you can make use of their various advanced features for feed presentation and subscriber analysis.
6. Gravatar
   Show the custom icons associated with the email addresses of users commenting on your entries. This is a great service more people should sign up for.
7. Head META Description
   Some search engines display the Description meta data for a page in search results. Since Wordpress normally uses the same meta data for all the pages on your site, this is a problem. This plugin builds a dynamic Description meta tag for each entriy based on the page content itself.
8. Optimal Title
   Moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before, letting you put the title of your post before your blogs name in the title tag for an entry.
9. Related Posts
   Displays a list of related entries based on keyword matches. This is a good way to encourage visitors to read more of the content on your blog.
10. WP-Amazon
    WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries. Great if you’re an Amazon affiliate, but also a good way to add some extra images to your blog entries.
11. WP-ContactForm
    This plugin creates a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.