If you are familiar with Content Management Systems there is a good chance you stumbled upon WordPress. It is a very powerful Blogsystem and there are a bunch of plugins and add-Ons available you should definitely know about. Of course you could replicate most of these functions yourself, but why reinvent the wheel?

All in One SEO Pack
This is by far the most popular plugin. What it does is quite simple: It gives you the possibility to optimize your entire website for search engines. If you are not absolutely sure whether you are going to use it don’t install it. If used sloppy it will do more harm than good.
After installing the plugin (I will not explain how to do that. Seriously, I won’t) you have to activate it again in its own settings. Here is a rough outline covering the most important ones.

Title Formats are a great way to improve your Google ranking. It’s just the way Google reads your website’s information. If every sub page of your blog has a similar title, Google won’t exactly send you a Christmas card. Instead try putting the post or page’s title in front of your blog name. It could look something like this:

Additionally, you have the possibility to add some information to every single post individually. You’ll find some new input fields underneath your posts editing fields, and this is quite helpful. These three fields can have a deep impact on your Google ranking – if you use them. Try to think of words and phrases YOU would use to find a post like yours.

If you think Theme my Login takes only one simple task – the style of your login – out of your hand, you’re wrong. It also gives you powerful control over the entire login and registration process. There is not much to tell you here, just scoop around, everything has pretty titles and descriptions, so you won’t have any problems finding the settings you need.

So, what benefit do you get from installing this plugin? For starters, you get a login screen that doesn’t look like crap from some other site. The user stays on the website he wanted to be and you keep your navigation in place, which can become very handy at times.

qTranslate is another neat little plugin which offers you the ability to run a multi-language blog. It is easy to use, and you can choose from a variety of languages. This plugin does not really translates your content, but gives you the fields to enter your content in every needed language. It also offers a language-switcher which can be easily embedded in your template.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved is a plugin you have already seen a couple of times on our site. It’s a simple and easy to style way to show your code-snippets. It speaks many different languages and comes with a number of predefined styles, so you don’t have to digg into its CSS-structure, even if you could show the results on your blog afterwards!

If you are like us, you always feel the need to optimize your website. Or maybe you have to do a redesign for a client. Well, unless you want to work on your live website or install a second instance of wordpress on your server (given the fact that this is not always possible) you will need this little plugin. It’s called WordPress Theme Demo and it will gives you the opportunity to work with two templates at once. Yes, thats right…two templates. The benefit of this is pretty clear: you can work with your real content while developing the theme, and when you’re done, it’s only a matter of two clicks until your masterpiece finds its way to the public.

Jake Rathmanner

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