Archive for July, 2009

Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 2

July 29th, 2009

Well, this is obviously the sequel of my previous post Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 1, where I gave you the selection of the most useful WordPress plugins for your posts, RSS feeds, video and comments maintaining. So, without further ado, here is the second part:

Statistics

* Backlinks inbound links counter
This plugin allows you to track all incoming links using MSN.
* Bsuite
This great plugin tracks your page loads, top performing posts, search terms that were used on incoming links and gives the list of related posts at the end of each entry.
* CountPosts
Allows you to see how many times each of your posts gets visited without counting visits from the admin.
* FeedBurner StandardStats
This plugin allows you to easily install the FeedBurner script to let you monitor your RSS feed statistics.
* FeedStats http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedstats-de/
Displays your feeds stats and measures the length of stay on your site at your dashboard.
* Live
Lets you see new comments, grabbed feeds and posts visited in real time.
* Open Web Analytics
This plugin allows you to track visits and unique visitors, page views and clicks, referring websites and even shows your visitor geography on Google Earth.
* Search Phrases
Very simple plugin that displays search terms that brought your visitors to the blog of yours.
* Ultimate Google Analytics
Allows you to easily add the Google Analytics script plus counts downloads and outbound links.
* WP-Stats
Gives you general stats - number of posts, comments etc.
* Alexa Rank
Well, displays your Alexa rank at your web page.
* Google PageRank
Displays your Google Page Rank at your web page.
* Impress
Lets you boast about the number of your users and posts, pages and comments, categories and many more on your weblog.

Social Bookmarking

* Digg Button
Gives you the opportunity to add Digg button anywhere within a post using a simple code snippet.
* JPF Add to Reddit
Allows your readers to easily and fast submit your posts to Reddit.
* Share This
Lets you add multiple social bookmarking links and email-this feature in one single button.
* Sociable
Adds links to 61 social bookmarking sites.
* Socializer Plugin
Gives you the ability to add your posts to almost 40 social bookmarking sites.
* WP-Notable
Allows you to add the links with icons of multiple social bookmarking sites to each blog entry.
* wphotspots
Allows you to track the activity of your posts on a number of social bookmarking sites.
* Ma.gnolia Widget
This widget lets you display links from your Ma.gnolia account.

Navigation

* WP-PageNavi
Gives you an opportunity to add a more advanced paging navigation at your blog.
* Wordpress Navigation List
Great plugin with drag ‘n drop interface that gives you the ability to easily create a completely unique site navigation.
* Multi-level Navigation
Allows you to add a horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu to your WordPress blog.
* Simple Sidebar Navigation
This is a very simple plugin that lets you add a widget to create custom navigation in any sidebar without writing any PHP code.

This is by far not the full list of useful plugins. WordPress is that much popular exactly due to the many features created every day, thus there are thousands of really helpful plugins. Feel free to share them in the comments below.

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins | 7 Comments »

15 Most Inspiring Uses Of Wordpress As CMS

July 27th, 2009

Undoubtedly, Wordpress is known as a powerful blogging platform used by webmasters all over the world. But we should admit that it is capable of providing much more facilities. The point is that due to some modifications and implementation of certain plugins you can turn your Wordpress into fully functional Content Management System. In order for you to see how it looks in the issue and get inspired for your own Wordpress transformations we present you the compilation of the most inspiring designs of Wordpress successfully used as CMS.

1. Weather Pops

gallery in wordpress

Weather Pops imply the set of characters related to weather which are available for licensing. This website possesses eye-catching design and shows how you can build simple but mighty website, including galleries, standard pages and contact forms in your Wordpress site.

2. TP Hire

This rental company website is distinguished by enhanced gallery page which maintains facilities for viewing images in larger size and in a slideshow. Separate attention should be paid to the Events Page as it shows very clearly how you can customize Wordpress pages to fit your individual website requirements.

(more…)

Posted in WordPress News | 7 Comments » Read the rest of this entry

Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 1

July 23rd, 2009



WordPress is the hugely popular blogging platform, no wonder there is such immense number of tools developed for WordPress powered blogs. To simplify your life I’ve made a selection of the most useful plugins and extensions to give you the ultimate list of WordPress tools.
Much has been said about such essential plugins as Akismet and All in One SEO Pack, thus I won’t touch upon them here. And don’t expect to see here tools for SEO, security, audio and image sharing as I already covered these subjects at this blog.


Tools for Posts:
* Auto Link
Automatically links keywords within your blog posts to any location you specify
* Category Posts Widget
You can specify how many posts you want to be shown within the specified category
* Code Markup
This plugin allows you to put snippets of code (HTML included) into the posts without affecting your page.
* Easy Post-To-Post Links
Use a shortcut to link to another posts on your blog.
* WP-PostRatings
Let your visitors vote for your posts. Plugin also allows to display the most or least ranked posts on your sidebar.
* WP-Footnotes
This plugin allows, well… to put footnotes at your posts.
* Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Gives a list of old posts on your blog related to the current one
* WP-PostViews
Displays the number of times a post has been viewed.


RSS Feed Tools:
* Feed Control
Among many features this plugin gives you are the ability to exclude posts from your feed and add pages.
* Feed Footer
Adds copyright and ads to your RSS posts.
* DeCat
Gives you an opportunity to select categories that won’t be included in your feeds.
* Feed Styler
Style your feed as you want it to be.
* FeedStats
Gives you every statistics on your feeds
* Subscribe-Remind
This nice plugin allows you to remind your readers to subscribe to your feed at the end of each post.


Video Tools:
* Easy Inline SWF
Allows you to easily insert Flash files in .swf format into your blog entries.
* Extreme Video
Allows you to play any .flv file on your blog. Supports YouTube, Quicktime, Google Video and more.
* YouTube Brackets
With this plugin you do not need to copy and paste embed code to insert a YouTube video into your post, all you need is to enter an URL
* SeeTheFace
This tool allows you to record video and post it at your blog.


Comments Tools:
* Bannage
With this plugin you can ban any annoying user by name, email, or IP.
* Admin Panel Comment Reply
This plugin will add a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of your WordPress admin area.
* WP-Most Commented Posts
Displays the most commented posts at your blog sidebar
* Live Comment Preview
With this plugin you will allow your users to preview their comments before posting them.
* Edit Comments XT
Your users will be able to edit their comments.
* DoFollow
Removes the “nofollow” attributes from links in comments.
* DoFollow Trackbacks
Removes “nofollow” attributes from the trackbacks.
* Show Top Commentators
List your most devoted commentators with links to their websites.


This was the first part of the list of the most essential WordPress tools. What type of tools would you like to see in the next part?

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins, WordPress tips | 4 Comments »

Plugins to Monetize Your Blog

July 21st, 2009



It’s not a secret that most of us are blogging to earn some money. Thus I decided to make a list of plugins that can help you with this goal.
The most popular way of making money online is Google AdSense. There are hundreds of articles on how to make money with Google AdSense and a number of plugins that make the installation easier and faster:


* Adsense Deluxe WordPress Plugin
This plugin will add a screen to your options panel. From that screen you will be able to create AdSense ad units and manage them, decide what sizes ads should be and at what parts of your blog they should be placed.


The plugins named below will help you easily add AdSense to your blog:


* Adsense Injection
* MightyAdsense
* Google AdSense Widget


As most of the AdSense WordPress plugins require editing your theme you might find Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin to be the better choice for you as it allows to insert Adsense ads to your WordPress blog without modifying the theme.


* AdSense Manager is also a very good WordPress plugin that will help you manage your ads. It generates the code automatically.


* Google Ad Wrap
This fruitful plugin wraps posts and comments at your blog inside Section Targeting tags thus giving you better targeted ads.


And these plugins will help you track your AdSense earnings:


* AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System WordPress Plugin
* Adsense Clicks Tracker
* Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin


Another popular resource of money for bloggers is Amazon.com. There are several plugins that can help you add different Amazon ad types to your WordPress blog.


* Amazon Autoposter
This free and user friendly plugin automatically posts Amazon products on any keyword you specify, thus helping you earn money with Amazon affiliate program.


* Amazon Associate Filter
This plugin will automatically add your associate id to all Amazon links in the posts and comments at your blog.


What affiliate programs do you use to monetize your blogs?

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins | 1 Comment »

How to Add WordPress Plugin. Simple Guide

July 16th, 2009



Almost every post at this blog is giving you useful and sometimes not that useful but curious plugins. It never occurred to me that someone of you may not know how to actually add those plugins to your WordPress powered blogs. Thus I’m going to fill in the missed point and give you a simple guide on how to add a plugin to your blog.


There are WordPress plugins that require editing your WordPress Theme template files and ones that do not require such modifications. Both types are installed the same way, just follow these simple steps:


* Download the desired plugin.
* Log-in to your WordPress admin panel.
* Click on Plug-ins on the left side of your panel.
* Click on Add New and then on the Upload Tab.
* Browse the downloaded plug-in file at your computer and click on Install Now.
* After your WordPress finishes the installation process click on Activate Plug-in.


That’s it, your WordPress plugin is added and active.
Generally this is everything you’ll need to do when adding a plugin, if there are other requirements the developer will for sure specify them, so read the text files that come with your plugin carefully. Besides, some plugins may require configuration, most WordPress Plugin authors give clear step-by-step instructions of the required configuration, so read these carefully as well.

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress tips | 3 Comments »

Is Your Blog SEO Friendly?

July 14th, 2009



We’ve discussed the importance of search engine optimization here more than once. But I think one more time won’t be a waste.
So, let’s revise what exactly SEO means and how it works.


SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a process of improving the volume and quality of your traffic received from search engines. To understand SEO better you should know how search engines work. This is pretty easy - such search engines as Google and Yahoo use a program called a “web spider”. These spiders crawl the web and collect info about the web pages (content, links etc.) and deposit this info to the search engine’s database. When you want to find something on the web and type your query in the search box the search engine has to do one simple thing - to find the most relevant info in it’s database. To make your blog more relevant to probable queries you should make it rank for the factors that form the search engine algorithm higher. This is where SEO will help you.
Here are things you should check and plugins you should add to make your blog SEO friendly:


* All in One SEO Pack
I already told you about this extremely useful plugin. It allows you to add meta tags, titles, descriptions and keywords to your blog posts.


* Google XML Sitemaps
If you want google spiders to crawl your weblog better you should help them - create a sitemap. This nice plugin will help you do the task easily and fast.


* Sociable
This is a great plugin I’ve already mentioned at this blog, it allows your visitors to bookmark your posts at 99 social bookmarking sites. Find more WordPress plugins meant to help you increase traffic. http://www.wpdaddy.com/blog/2009/03/increase-traffic-with-wordpress-plugins/


Things to check:


* Add Titles and ALT tags to the images you use in your blog entries


* Make sure your meta descriptions are unique and do not repeat your content


* Make sure your theme uses header tags correctly:
- Your blog title (your main keyword) should be placed in an h1 tag.
- Your post titles should be placed in h2 tags.


These are very basic SEO tips for beginners, if you have more simple tips feel free to share them in the comments below.

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins, WordPress tips | 2 Comments »

Top 10 Video Tutorials for WordPress Beginners

July 7th, 2009



When you are new to something you for sure prefer to have an expert who will show you the basics, don’t you? Well, I decided to make a selection of the most useful video tutorials recorded by real experts. Now you can say you’ve been taught by the best WordPress professionals ;)


Well, what do you want to know first of all? Of course how to install your WordPress, I can recommend these tutorials:
* How to install WordPress from siteground.com
* Installing Wordpress from killersites.com


Now you may be interested in changing your WP theme:
* How to Change/Activate Themes from ithemes.com
* How to change the theme from siteground.com
* How to Modify WordPress Theme from web2whizzing.com


Good tutorials on widgets:
* How widgets work from ithemes.com
* Create your first widget
* How To Make Your Own WordPress Widget from wpinformer.com


How to install and create your own plugins:
* How to install WordPress plugins from siteground.com
* How to make a wordpress plugin from weblogtoolsvideos.com


Well, this was my top 10 WordPress video tutorials. Would you like to see more of them?

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Tutorials | 3 Comments »

Top 5 Free WordPress Themes of June 2009

July 3rd, 2009



As you know WPDaddy collection is updated regularly, the new themes are added every day. You may also remember my post about the best themes of May, well I decided to make it a tradition and showcase my personal top 5 of the themes submitted each month. Well, here are the best 5 free WordPress themes of the June 2009


#5 Transformer 1.4
best wp theme
This 3 columns, right sidebar, widget ready theme designed by Zinruss Studio is nicely designed with the use of blue color palette and the theme of the new blockbuster - Transformers. If you are a fan of the movie you’ll love the theme either.


#4 Just News
best wordpress theme
This clean and stylish 3 Columns, right sidebar theme designed by NewWpThemes.com is a perfect choice for any online magazine or newspaper.


#3 Music Globe
best wordpress skin
Another theme by NewWpThemes.com is designed to be a perfect choice for music, entertainment and celebrity blogs. I really like the creative header of this 2 columns, right sidebar, widget ready theme


#2 Bali Beach
outstanding wordpress theme
This bright theme designed by Tamara Smith is 3 columns, right sidebar, widget ready and perfectly suitable for any traveler’s blog or traveling agency web presence. The header is so tempting, isn’t it?


#1 Eiffel Tower
number one wordpress theme
Do you love Paris? I do, as well as Tamara Smith who created this 3 columns, left sidebar, widget ready theme for a travel blog or travel guide, well, pretty much everything connected to vacation and travel.


Well, this was my personal top 5 of the themes submited in June 2009. Check out our collection for more brilliant Free WordPress Themes

Posted in WordPress Themes Showcase, WordPress Themes Updates | 4 Comments »