OrangeWeb.

Almost every Wordpress site I build have the same very important elements which remain vital in the success of the blog/website. One of these elements which help contribute to their success is a stash of fantastic plugins.

There are a lot of plugins for Wordpress floating around and only in the last few months have I really started to explore and experiment with what is out there. Amongst my playing around, there was also a bit of serious work too, I have discovered my 5 plugins which I consider to be very powerful, useful, simple to implement and use and above all very Search Engine Friendly. I can honestly say that on every WP site I have built in the last couple of months (approx 4-5) I have used these 5 definitive “must have” Wordpress plugins. And here they are (in no order):

1. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin dynamically generates an XML sitemap for your website. It pings and notifies all major search engines which can help increase the crawl rate, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc. You can add custom URLs to the sitemap, modify the Priority, Change Frequency and furthermore you can also submit this sitemap to your google webmaster tools (or equivalent).
2. Platinum SEO – Simply, Platinum SEO optimised your blog/website for search engines. Features include; canonical urls, automatic 301 redirects for change in permalink, automatically creates meta tags and loads more.
3. Broken Link Checker – Broken Link Checker crawls through your blog looking for broken links. If any are found you will be notified on your dashboard and be presented with a couple of actions in attempt to rectify the problem. It also picks up missing images.
4. Top Level Categories – This plugin’s task is simple yet very effective. Use it to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page. E.g. “yourdomain.com/category/latest-news/” would  simply be “yourdomain.com/latest-news/”
5. The Excerpt re-reloaded – This plugin does a little bit more than the standard Wordpress excerpt function. It allows you to choose excerpt length, html tags, the link text to full post and the html container of the excerpt. Makes for much more userful and prettier exceprts.

Websites always need good looking images and there are many ways a designer can make them look good. A problem I commonly run into is that when I have built a website with a CMS, when I hand the site over to the client they want to update the imagery, but can’t get it to look as nice.

Generally I do try to keep image decorations to a minimum, but sometimes that little bit extra can help bring an image to life. Features such as a simple border or subtle drop shadow can really enhance an image.

Similiarly with images that are hyperlinks, we can’t expect to use javascript to change the image on a rollover, or create a sprite for every single image. CSS can provide an alternative to this issue with simplistic image rollovers.

I have created examples of 6 different techniques achieved with CSS that can help to enhance your image.

1.   Outside Border
2.   Drop Shadow
3.   Outer Glow
4.   Outer Glow With Border
5.   Rollover (Opacity)
6.   Rollover (Outer Glow With Border)

Click here to view the source and see these examples is action.

I love to design, I really do. The thought of starting with almost nothing and growing it into an interesting and successful website is something that I simply just love. But bringing your best design to life obviously requires practice.
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