A toolkit for first time WordPress bloggers
First I’ll just say that I don’t believe this list is the holy grail of what you SHOULD do as a first time WordPress blogger, but these are the things I usually do each time I create a new WordPress blog. If anyone else would like to jump in with more suggestions, great :) Now then, this is my list of tools and plugins I like to start out each new blog with.
- Obviously you’re going to need WordPress, right? If you haven’t already downloaded it, you can snag that from the WordPress website.
- Google Sitemap – You’re most likely going to want your site to be indexed on Google, so installing the Google Sitemap plugin is probably the easiest way to handle that task.
- Feedburner – If you want people to be able to subscribe to your site’s RSS feed I would suggest installing the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin. This directs your site’s RSS feed to Feedburner thus allowing you keep track of stats on your feed and do a whole lot of other very cool things.
- DoFollow – If you want to be a kind and link loving blogger you’ll install the dofollow plugin. With this plugin installed people who comment on your blog will receive a linkback from you.
- SEO Title Tag – This plugin allows you to better optimize your WordPress installation for search engines. It’s pretty simple to use once you get the hang of it.
- Related Posts – This great little plugin allows you to assign keywords to posts, thus creating posts that are related to each other. For example if you write tutorials on your blog and give them the keyword of tutorial you’ll begin to see a list below each tutorial entry called Related Posts. Very handy.
- Clean Archives – I’ve mentioned this plugin before. If you want to have a very slick and clean looking page which archives your posts by month and day, this is the perfect plugin to use.
- Subscribe to Comments – Give your commenters the ability to subscribe to comments for specific posts that way they can keep track of new replies and return to the discussion later.
- AddThis – Give your readers the ability to add posts from your site to popular social networks like Digg, Del.ic.ious and so on. It’s very simple to install and creates a nice and simple little button at the end of your posts.
I’m sure most will agree that there are many more important plugins available for WordPress, but these are the ones which I install from the very beginning with every blog.
Now once you’ve got WordPress set up and your plugins in place and have begun to do a little posting, it’s time to do some promoting. Two of the most popular places you can join to promote your blogs are MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Both of these sites allow you to interact with your blogging peers, join their communities (and them join yours), add them to your friends list and send messages. Most people I’ve come across generally tend to prefer one more than the other. I personally prefer MyBlogLog. With either service though you’ll be able to create a widget for your site, which you can place right in your sidebar and visually be able to see who is visiting your blog. Very cool.
Happy blogging!
This should be helpful for me switching to WordPress… thanks Mike! I may use some of this great advice in developing my new blog. :)
Hehe…I thought of your new blog as I was putting this together. I hoped it might be helpful to you :)
I think most people like to have pictures on their blog too, so I think Gallery and WPG2 are pretty up there for us WordPress users. Good list though, it may not be the holy grail, but it’s a pretty freakin’ good list.
Ya know I’ve tried messing with Gallery and such and I just gave up on it…lol. But you’re right those are great for people that like to run photoblogs especially. I didn’t have the patience with getting it all set up though. I swear I have ADD.
Why can’t I understand WordPress? “sniff”
It’s because you’re too busy making all that a-lister moolah without it :P
Nicely done, Mike. I think I’ll give the SEO Title Tag plugin a try. I recently started using All-in-one SEO pack; verdicts still out on that, but seems easy enough to use.
I definitely Subscribe To Comments is a must-have!
The Add Meta Tag, and SEO Title plugin are recommended.
I am so pleased as punch that you thought of me while making this list – The Gift of Lists is one of the greatest gifts of all, you know.
Wordpress is really giving me a hard time though. I am trying to customize the Kubrick theme and I am 3% PHP (the other 97% was lost in pasteurization).
Hi Danielle, I hope you don’t mind me butting in here, but I thought I’d offer what I can in the way of help. Without more details I’m just shooting in the dark, but perhaps you might find a theme that’s easier to work with here. :)
@Mark: I’ve been using the title tag plugin for a while now. It’s really nice. You can even go in and change the title for pages and posts you’ve already created.
@Danielle: What customizations are ya trying to make to it?
@Baron: I still need to grab that Meta Tag plugin. I keeping telling myself I need to, but I never seem to pay attention to me.
Yeah, I looked through those themes but I want mine to be really really different… it is just going to take me a few weeks for me to figure out all this PHP stuff. I am going to add plugins and whatnot as well. I had initially found a few that I liked but I did not want all the features, and then I would remove them and I would get errors, so I will stick to Kubrick for now as a guideline. I am buying a few books this weekend and hopefully I can study up on those and will be A OK by next weekend.
I just want it to be very simple, but different and lots of pink. I don’t want lots of clutter on my main page, I want to include pages (much as Mike has here) to categorize things that are not “posts”.
So wish me luck on the “July PHP Challenge”. :)
I just want to be able to say: Yes, I made this WordPress theme, you know?
I’m sure it will be great, Danielle :) That’s probably the right way to do it too. If you’re just looking for a simple design, it makes sense to use Kubrick as a base.
@Danielle: I wish you luck indeed! Looking forward to it, and remember to have fun. :)
Very nice post. I have most of them installed but I didn’t know about the feedsmith plug in. Thanks:)
Hey Mike, I just started a new blog and suddenly I found myself lost in regards to plugins! I’m really happy you had made this post so I don’t have to comb through my stuff to try and remember what I have and what I don’t.
Oh, and I should’ve said it before – WPG2 and Gallery are not fun plugins to get started with imho. I don’t know what your background is, but mine is Computer Science…And I’m sayin’ no fun! Even though I have it up and running on bushmackel.com, I still never got it customized to my old theme, and now I’m going to have to start over getting it right with my new one. *groan* (And on my new blog *double groan*)
Gallery has sooooo many files to it as well. My god it takes forever to upload, even on a broadband connection :-o
I need to eventually get it all configured on my other domain though, because I want to do some things with the e-card plugin. I’m not really looking forward to it though…lol.
Hey Mike,
I think this is a great list. I have a lot of these on my site already, however I have to admit that I am missing a few. I think I am going to download and install the ones that I am missing. Thanks again.
Hey Andrew :) I’m glad you found the information useful! I may just have to write some more posts like these. Folks seem to like them :)
Nice post Mike, as you point out there are 100′s of others, yet these are a great starter bunch to highlight.
Its posts like these that help people new to wordpress understand what is and what isnt useful. A trawl through the WP plugin directory would leave many feeling mightly confused.
Thanks Rob :) Oh man the first time I ever started using WordPress I checked out that plugin directory. That was also the last time I checked it out…lol.
Thanks for the list. That clean archives plugin looks like a nice addition to my own site.
All the best.
Hi David. Glad ya found something useful in the list :) The clean archives plugin is very nice. It’s the cleanest looking archive plugin I’ve managed to find so far.