www.BreakingOut.NET » Launch Your Own Website – Part Six: Installing WordPress Plug-Ins and Widgets

Launch Your Own Website – Part Six: Installing WordPress Plug-Ins and Widgets

Written by kevin

This is Part Six of my article series entitled “Launch Your Own Website” based on my practical experience in launching my own site.

The series will also be made available later in PDF form as a FREE download for all readers of BreakingOut.NET.

In Part Six I explain how you can install some useful Plug-ins for WordPress and configure some WordPress Widgets for your site.

What are WordPress Plug-Ins?

WordPress Plug-ins are modules which offer additional useful functions for your blog. They’re simple to install and most of them are free.

The best place to find good quality Plug-ins is the official WordPress Plug-ins page at wordpress.org/extend/plugins. There are thousands of Plug-ins available and it’s very easy to get carried away and install a large number of Plug-ins.

However, I’d recommend that you DON’T install too many at once. Installing too many Plug-ins can lead to configuration conflicts and strange effects on your site which can be time consuming and troublesome to debug.

In practice, there’s probably only a dozen or so Plug-ins that you will most likely want to use.

How to install a WordPress Plugin

Installing WordPress Plug ins is simple. Once you’ve downloaded your Plug-in, login to your WordPress Dashboard and click on the Plug-in -> Add New

The Plug in then uploads to your site. For some Plug-ins you need to click on “activate” to switch on the Plugin.

Below is a list of seven Plug ins that I find most useful. All of these Plug-ins are available free of charge via the WordPress.org site

Seven “must have” WordPress Plug-Ins for your site

● Akismet This is a comment spam protector that comes already built into WordPress. All you need to do is activate this Plug-in. To do this, you need to first obtain a “API key” from the WordPress.com site.

The API key is a digital code available free from WordPress.com. You may need it for some other Plug-ins as well, so the best advice is to make a careful note of it as soon as you receive it.

● WP Super Cache makes your website pages load much faster by storing static versions of your site’s content. This avoids any delays in displaying the content of your site for your visitors.

● WP-DBManager lets you backup your website conveniently and with minimum effort.

● Headspace 2 is an excellent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool which presents your site’s content to search engines in the most effective way. This helps enormously in building up traffic to your blog.

● WordPress.com Stats is a statistics tool which gathers and displays information on the WordPress Dashboard about the visitors to your site. You need to input your API key for this Plug-in.

● Google XML Sitemaps creates a sitemap page for your website which makes is easier for search engines to index your site.

● Contact Form 7 provides a professional looking Contact page for your site. Visitors can then email you directly without having to use an email program. It also saves you having to put your email address on your site which can found by spammers.

Now you can go on to activate some Widgets for your site.

Configure WordPress Widgets

Widgets are a bit like Plug-ins, but they’re much smaller, more like mini “apps”. They’re a neat and quick way to add functionality to the Sidebars of your site. Like most Plugins, they’re also free.

WordPress comes with a number of the most popular Widgets already provided in the Dashboard for you to use. For example, there are Widgets to display your recent posts or comments, or to provide a search field, or space for a “sticky” text paragraph on a sidebar.

You activate the Widgets you want to use on your site by Widgets to your site’s Sidebars by using “drag and drop” within the WordPress Dashboard. You can also remove or reposition them in the same way.

Some Widgets you might want to activate on your site

● Categories Widget You’ll almost certainly want to use the Categories Widget. This displays a menu of your Post Categories on the Sidebar.

● Recent Posts Widget Most blogs use this one. It lets you display the names of your latest Posts on the Sidebar.

● Recent Comments Widget This Widget is similar to the Recent Posts one, but does the same for comments.

● Search Widget Most blogs provide a search engine facility so visitors can easily search your site.

● Text Widget This is a great way to display a paragraph or more of fixed text in the Sidebar of your blog.For example a Welcome message, explaining what your site is about, or for making special announcements.

All the WordPress Plug-Ins mentioned are available free of charge. To download them, visit the WordPress.org site.