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Archive for April, 2009

13 Beneficial Wordpress Plugins For Your Design Blog

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There are quite a few reasons for choosing Wordpress as my personal favorite Content Managment System (CMS) – simple back end interface, Search Engine friendly (SEO Friendly), open source (so it’s free!) and my personal favorite, the massive amount of plugins that are available that add extra functionality to your website or blog.

Below I explore and discuss the benefits of 13 Wordpress plugins that I have personally used on The Design Cubicle that will give your site an extra boost and provide a better experience for your visitors (plus some other great additions you can add).

Akismet

askimet_spam

Saves you time and frustration with spam comments. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service and filters them so you can easily scan them or delete them later.

BENEFIT: Stops all that nasty spam from getting to your reader comments.

All in One SEO Pack

An “out-of-the-box” SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

BENEFIT: Makes your blog “friendlier” and better seen by search engines (ie. Google, Yahoo, etc). Allows you to add a home title, home description, keywords (meta tags) and more.

Tip: try limiting your site to 10  keywords or less; this allows search engines to place importance on a few, dominate words providing better results when someone searches for your site.

cformsII

contact_forms

CformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog.

Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more.

BENEFIT: Easily customize contact forms for your website for your readers and contacts to get in touch with you. Fields can be added and customized to fit you and your visitors particular needs.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.

BENEFIT: Improves your sites visibility providing search engines with information about your site, in particular a list of the pages on your site, making it more discoverable and SEO friendly.

Highlight Author Comments

highlight_comments

Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by the post’s author.

BENEFIT: Helps your readers visually distinguish your comments from your readers.

Social Bookmarks

Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.

BENEFIT: Get your articles easily submitted to various social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and a whole lot more. Assists in increasing your sites traffic!

Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

BENEFIT: Provides a way for your readers to stay engaged and connected to a conversation. Sets the ground work for a community and discussion on your blog.

Woopra

woopra

This plugin adds Woopra’s real-time analytics to any WordPress installation.

Live track over 40 different statistical events and analytics through Woopra’s rich and efficient desktop application or from the Wordpress Dashboard. Check out more information about the features and download the desktop application on Woopra’s site.

BENEFIT: Provides you with the information you need to strenthen your site, thus improving your results and visitor interactions.

Wordpress Gravatars

Makes use of Gravatars and MyBlogLog Avatars, places Gravatars, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or MyBlogLog Avatars in the comments section.

BENEFIT: Puts a face to your commentors. A nice touch to add more of a community feel to your site.

wp-cache

Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.

BENEFIT: Speed up the load time of your site. Works like a charm for those high traffic days and social media spikes.

Also try WP Super Cache for even more responsive load times.

WP-PageNavi

page-navi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

BENEFIT: Adds a more advanced page navagation, instead of the standard ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links – helps your readers get around more effectively.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

BENEFIT: Help readers discover similar content and related posts – adds to a more enjoyable and resourceful visit.

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Top 10 WordPress Themes for Girls

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1. Elegant Jewel

elegant-jewel
This is an awe-inspiring piece of WordPress Theme embellished with ornaments and voguish fashion photographs.

Link

2. Cherish

 

cherish

With a touch of pink and a feminine grace, this free WordPress theme offers the right occassion to cherish your love and pending nuptials.
Link

3. DivaLicious

divalicious
This is an enticing piece of WordPress work with stunning girl vector. The 2 column theme with fixed width is embellished with hues of gray. The theme is widigetized and XHTML valid.

Link

4. WP Girls Talk

 

wp_girls_talk
This 3 column girly WP theme appears lovely with the blend of white and magenta. For the features, this free theme is widget ready theme developed in valid XHTML and CSS.

Link

5. WP Ladies Vector

wp-ladies-vector
This is a 3 column free WP theme in shades of green.  It’s a widget ready theme in valid XHTML and CSS compatible with latest Wordpress 2.5.1 and Wordpress 2.3.

Link

6. Cute-red

 

cute-red-m
It’s an elegant WordPress theme with a shades of red, pink and white. This free 2 column theme is widget ready and features search box in the header.

Link

7. v4ny4

 

v4ny4
It’s one of most square and chic WP theme for girls. With  dark background it’s a truly awesome theme.


Link

8. WP Lovely Rose

 

wp-lovely-rose
Those girls craving for a maudlin looking Wordpress theme can pick this piece. It’s a 3 column theme in valid XHTML and CSS that works with the latest WordPress 2.7.1.

Link

9. Lady Unicorn

 

lady-unicorn
This is a 2 column widgetized theme with an enchanting appeal. It’s an adsense ready theme with friendly sites banner spot.

Link

10. Pink White Valentine

 

pink-white-valentine
This free romantic theme in feminine pink and white is an alluring piece for ladies. It features 3 columns, and is done in valid XHTML and CSS.
It’s compatible with the latest Wordpress 2.7.1.

Link

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Eliminating spam is good- SEO

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One of the most common forms of comment and pingback spam right now is the relatively subtle, ambiguous kind — short phrases or questions that are not obviously spam, at least on face value. Since we last posted about this, the more sophisticated spammers have progressed from old standbys like “nice post” and “great blog”, to more cunning things like questions (”where can I download your theme?”) and appeals to your helpful nature (”I’m having trouble subscribing to your RSS feed”).

Akismet almost always catches these kinds of bogus comments.

The tip-off of course is that they often include a link to a site that’s advertising dubious or sleazy merchandise (or worse, a web site that harms the viewer’s computer). But it’s easy to forget to look at the link before approving a comment, or give the comment author the benefit of the doubt without checking closely. And spammers have recently learned to post several comments over time, the first of which contains no link or obvious clue. (We call these precursor spams).

Anyway, a comment is a comment, right, so what’s the harm in approving a few tame platitudes, even if they were posted by spammers?

Unfortunately it is harmful, and most of the damage is to your own site.

By moving these comments out of your spam folder and publishing them on your blog, you’re doing three things, all of them bad:

1. You are undermining your site’s SEO.

The spammer’s web site might seem inoffensive on face value. But the black-hat SEO and spam methods used by its promoter are not. That same spammer is busy building backlinks from anywhere they can find them, including some of the web’s worst neighbourhoods. By regularly publishing links to spammers’ web sites, you’re giving Google and other search engines a hint that links from your blog are poor quality.

Now it’s true that Google will try not to penalize a web site for inadvertently linking to a bad neighbourhood. But even if they don’t, you are weakening the value of each of the other links from your blog - “diluting your GoogleJuice”, if you like - and helping to validate the spammer’s web site. In some cases you might even find that you are helping the spammer overtake your blog in search engine results.

2. You are attracting more spammers.

Less skilled spammers will deliberately seek out blogs that other spammers have successfully spammed, because they know they are easy targets. Organized spammers circulate lists of such blogs (for a small fee of course). And professionals keep their own lists of previous victims, because they know future spam is even more likely to be approved there. By letting some spam through - even seemingly harmless ones - you are providing a signal to spammers that your blog is a profitable target. (Experienced bloggers will be familiar with this phenomenon: you accidentally approve one seemingly unremarkable spam comment, and a big batch of ugly spam follows soon after).

WordPress and many other blog applications have a feature, independent of Akismet, where regular users who have had at least one comment approved, will automatically skip the moderation queue next time and have their comments published right away. Spammers know this, and they’ll come back to take advantage of it. Often they’ll link to a harmless looking site in their first comment (or include no link at all), but link to progressively more blatant spam in subsequent comments.

3. You are damaging your reputation.

You might not click on the links in all the comments on your blog, but some of your readers will. And some of those links will go to sites that are sleazy, offensive, or harmful.

Worse still, a spam tactic that is becoming more popular is to first post a small number of spam comments on innocent blogs; then send a large volume of spam to other web sites linking to the blog post that contains those comments. (They do this to try to get around spam filters and blacklist that recognize and catch links to their own site).

If you do publish spam comments on your blog, you might discover later that thousands of other blogs and forums have been spammed with links to your blog.

So what should you do about it?

Akismet will almost always catch these comments and put them in your Spam folder. Usually you don’t need to do anything; just don’t approve them for publication.

We have a real-time view of spam activity on millions of blogs around the world, so we can detect patterns in behaviour that can’t be seen by looking at any one single comment. If a bland, generic comment turns up in your spam folder, you should be suspicious of it - Akismet flagged it for a reason. Think twice before approving it for publication. Unless you know the author, it almost certainly is spam — or a subtle precursor to it.

Also, keep an eye out for forthcoming Akismet updates. In addition to our usual work behind the scenes monitoring and adapting to new spam techniques, we’re developing some new features designed specifically to help protect against the potential harm done by spammers.

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