Website Managers

Posts Tagged ‘WordPress plugins’

Using these WordPress plugins can make your blog more interactive, sticky to keep visitors coming back for more and used by novices and power bloggers alike. Not all of these plugins need to be used on a single blog, depending on the focus of your site.

Where there are multiple options to perform a single task, I like to spread them out across several blogs to see which ones work best, or fit the look and feel of that site. I use every one of these plugins on various sites, except the eCommerce plugins. Those will come later as those sites are built. The ones listed are the best I found and tested in the WordPress Plugin category. Since this was originally posted on Feb 14, 2009, the list has continued to grow. Read the rest of this entry »

During the past few weeks my blog and other sites had been painfully slow. The page loading time was in excess of 15 seconds. When in the WordPress dashboard, I would click a button to update a setting and go do something else for 2 minutes while the page loaded.

As a marketer, we are told that we have 7 seconds to grab the attention of visitors. If the page takes longer than that to load, there is a good chance they will go someplace else.

The slow loading became so frustrating that I called our web host, Pagematic. Since some of the sites I run are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), things that others do on that server can affect the performance of my websites. For instance, if someone ran intensive or poorly written scripts on their VPS, the entire srever can slow down. In this instance, Pagematic located the sites that were running scripts which are not allowed on the server and shut them down. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot of publicity lately with a WordPress plugin that allows you to tweet your WordPress posts automatically with Publicize. That only works with WordPress.com though. For self-hosted WordPress blogs, there are other plugins you can use.

If you want to get the most out of publicizing your post, there is a more involved method that works even better than a single plugin. Using the steps below, you can make sure your posts are announced on all the sites you belong to. This will take you less than 30 minutes and well worth the effort!

1. Register for Ping.fm and choose all the sites where you want your posted.
2. Get a HootSuite.com account and add your Ping.fm application (API) key in the Settings.
   • The API key is obtained by clicking on Application Keys from your Dashboard
3. Install the WordTwit (or your favorite Twitter announce) plugin on your WordPress blog

Now when you write a post, it gets sent to Twitter, which is picked up by Hootsuite, passed on to Ping.fm, then sent to all the sites you have enabled there (Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, Yahoo!, MyBlogLog, plus many other sites). Sounds complicated, if you spend 30 minutes to set up, you will achieve greater results.

If you know of a better way, let us know.

 When you want to sell items online, you should look first to the WP e-Commerce shopping cart WordPress plugin. I have seen this plugin in action and believe me, it does what it says. The plugin even creates a "Products" page for you when it is activated.

Shopping Cart Upgrades

• DropShop 2.0: An AJAX driven drag and drop shopping cart solution.
• New MP3 Audio Player: This plugin allows you to upload an MP3 preview file that is streamed the user
• Product Slider: Allow your shoppers to browse through products without leaving the page. Simply add the slider module to your WP e-commerce powered site and add the slider to any page.
• Members Only module: Create pay to view subscription sites. Perfect for private: – Wordpress posts and pages – Podcast websites – Image galleries – Movie galleries – Forums
• NextGen Gallery Buy Now Buttons: This plugin adds either a google checkout or a PayPal "buy now" button next to your images in your nextGen gallery image.

Installation Options

1. Download WP e-Commerce shopping cart from Instinct
2. Go into your WordPress Dashboard, expand the Plugins tab and click Add New. In there you can search for WP e-Commerce shopping cart. The system will install it for you.

Conclusion