10 Useful WordPress Plugins for Web Designers
WordPress has taken the CMS market by storm. It’s a powerful platform that makes our lives as designers easier and it allows for our clients to become more involved in the updating process.
There are so many plugins that could make this list, so it was really hard to choose 10. If you have something that I have missed, don’t hesitate to post a comment with a link to the plugin. So here is my list.
1. Google XML Sitemap Generator
We all know how important it is to keep an up to date sitemap, so with this plugin, you can do just that. The Google XML Sitemap Generator will generate a XML sitemap that will help search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com better index your wordpress site or blog.
Why not sell something on your blog or website? WP e-Commerce powerful shopping cart from Instict that will allow you to have a shopping cart up in minutes.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, then you know what Twitter is. People from every walk of life use it. It’s a way to connect, advertise, and just catch up with friends. The TweetMeme plugin easily allows your blog to be retweeted. It will even keep a count of how many times your post has been retweeted on Twitter.
NextGEN Gallery is one of the better image galleries available for WordPress. It has a great flash slideshow option, an integrated TinyMCE button to easily add your gallery to a post or page, an AJAX based thumbnail generator, and so much more.
“HTTP 404, Page not found.” Don’t we all hate to get this. The Broken Link Checker will monitor your blog or wordpress powered site for broken links and let you know is any are found.
6. WP-DB-Backup
What could be worst than your database crashing? Not a lot, so with the WP-DB-Backup plugin, you can easily backup the core database tables for WordPress. You can even backup other tables in the database.
There are several different contact form plugins for wordpress that may be more powerful than this one. But the ease of use is what makes it a better plugin in my opinion. You can manage multiple forms with full customization options. The form supports Captcha and Akismet Spam filtering.
This plugin adds a SEO friendly standard or dropdown menu to your WordPress powered site or Blog. It has a easy to use interface to change the style to meet the design of your site.
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. Invisible Defender also shows number of blocked spammers in Dashboard.
