WordPress Plugins No Blogger Should Be Without

Sometimes, finding the best wordpress plugins for your wordpress blog can be quite a feat. There are practically thousands of free wordpress plugins that you can download and use to enhance and elevate your wordpress blog to another level, but finding and selecting the best ones to suit your blog or blogs can be a very time consuming affair.

Personally for me, I have a list of core or essential wordpress plugins that I always use for any wordpress blogs that I set up. This core list consists of wordpress plugins which I have tested and find them extremely useful for my wordpress blogs. In a nutshell, this is a list of wordpress plugins that no blogger should be without.

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10 Free High Quality Premium WordPress Themes

Nowadays, the quality of free themes is vastly superior to those in the past. When I first started using WordPress, free quality themes are a rarity. The only way you can get a quality theme for your wordpress blog is by paying for one. With the vast number of quality themes available for free download; bloggers are spoilt for choice to select one for their blogs.

I have include in this list what I feel to be the best 10 free high quality premium wordpress themes I have come across. There are probably many themes that are better than what I have listed here and I would appreciate if you can share them with us. I hope you will find these themes useful!

Arthemia

Black Magic

Color Paper

Curious Demo

Freemium

Irresistible

Magazeen

Snapshot

Typebased

Vintage

List of Ping Sites For Your WordPress Blog

Pinging occurs whenever your WordPress blog published a new post. Pinging is a term used in blogging in which your blog will notify other people about new and updated content on your blog. It is also a very good way to let the search engines know about new and updated content on your blog and get them to come and index your blog.

That is why it is essential for you to have a good list of ping sites added to your WordPress blog. The list below is by no means comprehensive but this is a good list to start off with.

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Have You Upgrade To WordPress 2.7?

The latest version of WordPress is available for downlaod since early last month. If you have not upgrade your  WordPress to version 2.7, it is time to do so. The new version of WordPress is a major update with a new interface and lots of new features to boot.

I have waited about a month till the latest version is available through Fantastico before I make the automatic upgrade. I was initially apprehensive as I have previously have some bad experiences with major updates for WordPress.In some of the previous updates, I found some of the eseential plugins that I have been using are not compatible after the upgrading causing me lots of inconvinenece.

Luckily,  all my plugins are working fine after the latest upgrade. So if you have been sitting on the fence for some time waiting for the version 2.7 to stablize, I can safely tell you it is time for you to upgrade your WordPress.

Ways To Monetize Your WordPress Blog

Compare to a few years back when blogging is still in its infancy, there are more ways to monetize a blog nowadays. People love blogs as the content get updated regularly and as a result blogs started to attract and retain loyal audiences. As such, many companies began to see blogs as a channel to advertise and market their products and services to specific targeted audience giving way to bloggers to earn a slice of the advertising revenue enjoyed by traditional advertising channels such as TV, radio and newspaper in the past.

Blogs are also becoming more and more popular due to their versatility as a platform for marketing intent. A WordPress blog besides being a conventional blog can also be customize to become an e-commerce store, landing site, membership site and a conventional content website and more. Now you can understand why I advocate using WordPress as a blogging platform compared to other blogging platforms.

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How To Install WordPress Using Fantastico

The good thing about having a web hosting account with Fantastico is that installation of WordPress is a breeze. If you intend to set up a lot of WordPress blogs in the future, it pays having a hosting account that provides Fantastico. However, if you currently have an account without Fantastico, you can still set up WordPress blogs easily by yourself, albeit with a little bit more work. You can check out my previous post on “Manual Installation of WordPress” to learn how to install WordPress manually.

Now, to use Fantastico to install your WordPress blogs automatically, first of all you need a web hosting account with Fantastico. After you have log into your hosting account, you have to click on the Fantastico icon shown below.

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Manual Installation Of WordPress

For those of you who do not have Fantastico inside your hosting account or other means to install WordPress automatically, you will need to learn how to install WordPress manually. That is why I strongly recommend getting a hosting account with Fantastico. This makes WordPress installation a breeze especially if you have a lot of sites to set up.

Do not fret out if your current web host does not support Fantastico or automatic installation of WordPress. Manual installation is quite easy and once you get the hang out of it, you will be able to manual install a WordPress blog in minutes. Basically, manual installation of WordPress involves the following few steps as follows:

1. Download the latest version of WordPress in zip format and save it to your desktop.
2. FTP the latest version of WordPress to your domain directory inside your hosting account.
3. Set up a MySQL database for your new WordPress blog.
4. Unzip or extract the WordPress zip file into your domain directory folder.
5. Run WordPress installation.
6. Start posting.

I’m not going to go in depth into manual installation of WordPress as there is a good guide from WordPress to guide you along. You can check out “Installing WordPress” for a more comprehensive guide on how to install WordPress manually on your own hosting account.

Setting Up A WordPress Blog

WordPress is simply the best blogging platform out there for beginners and experience bloggers alike. For those of you who are looking to set up a wordpress blog on your own domain and hosting, you can get a feel of the WordPress blogging platform over at WordPress.com. Basically, what you need is just an email account to sign up for a free hosted wordpress blog to get started.

This simple tutorial is to guide those who are new online to sign up for an account with WordPress.com and set up their very first free hosted WordPress blog. Just follow these simple steps and you will be well on your way to your first WordPress blog.

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Choosing A Platform For Your Website

Once you got your domain name and web hosting sorted out, it is time to decide on the platform to build your website on. It is a very important decision to make as it can be a source of frustration and waste of time and effort if you find that the platform you are using falls short in many areas down the road.

Which platform to use depends a lot on the type of website that you are going to set up?

If you are looking to create one page landing sites or multi-pages mini sites, you can use Dreamweaver or FrontPage to design and create HTML web pages for your websites. For blogs, you can go for popular blogging platforms such B2Evolution, Expression Engine, Movable Type, Text Pattern and WordPress. I highly recommend using WordPress if you are going to start a blog.

For a content heavy site, you can use either Drupal or Joomla to do so. Drupla and Joomla will be good for creating e-commerce sites, membership sites or content heavy sites which need a good CMS (Content Management System). When I first started out online, I used Joomla to create most of my sites. One thing I like about Joomla is the vast number of free templates and plugins available just like WordPress.

For forums, you have a choice of forum platforms such as vBulletin, Invision Power Board, phpBB and SMF. The latter two are free whereas vBulletin and Invision Pwer Board are paid platforms. I have had experiences with vBulletin, phpBB and SMF and I can highly recommend using them. As for Invision Power Board, although I do not have any experience using it, is highly recommended by a lot of webmasters. If you are looking to build a forum site, you can give these few forum platforms some serious consideration.

Personally for me, I used WordPress for all my blogs, Joomla for content heavy sites and vBulletin and SMF for my forums. In recent months, I start to convert existing sites to the WordPress platform. As WordPress is becoming more and more powerful and flexible to use for all types of sites, I find it the perfect platform to use on all my sites.

I have compile a list of recommended software platform below that you can use for your sites.

Blogs
• B2Evolution
• Expression Engine
• Movable Type
• Text Pattern
• WordPress

Content Heavy / Ecommerce / Membership Sites
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Wordpress

Forum
• Invision Power Board
• phpBB
• SMF
• vBulletin

6 Reasons To Use WordPress

You have probably read my posts before and know that I advocate using WordPress as your blogging platform. If you need any convincing on using WordPress, here’s a 6 reasons why WordPress is so great!

1) There are millions of free cool looking themes for you to download and use. Imagine what you can do with all these free themes around, you can practically change your blog’s look every single day for the next 100 years or so! Now, if only you can live that long!

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