Optimize ROI

WordPress is a popular blogging engine and CMS in part because of the active community of users and the vast resources that are available. There are thousands of plugin developers that have worked to extend the possibilities of WordPress, and these plugins can provide plenty of opportunities for you to add new features and functionality to your site. In this post we’ll look at 13 powerful plugins that allow you to take your WordPress-powered site well beyond just a blog. These plugins will help you to create e-commerce websites, mobile-friendly sites, forums, community-based sites, and more. This post is supported by Webdesigner Depot, a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.

WordPress Plugins to Transform Your Site:

MobilePress MobilePress is one of several free plugins that helps you to create a mobile-friendly website. With MobilePress you can create custom themes for different handheld devices. It also integrates with Aduity for serving ads on your mobile site. WordPress Mobile Pack WordPress Mobile Pack includes a standard mobile theme, a mobile switcher that automatically selects a version of your site (desktop or mobile) to be presented, a mobile admin panel, mobile analytics, and more. Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin The Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin will detect the device being used by your mobile visitors and tailors all aspects of the blog/site accordingly. You can use your existing theme without needing to use a separate, generic theme for mobile visitors. WPtouch WPtouch is a plugin and a mobile theme for your blog or website. Touch mobile device users will experience a faster-loading site that is modeled after Apple’s app store design specs. Alkivia Open Community If you’re looking to build a user community on a WordPress-based site, this plugin can do the job. Each user will get a profile page, which can be managed by the administrator. Users can upload images into a gallery, as well as other types of content. WordPress Wiki Instinct, the makers of WP e-Commerce, also offer the free WordPress Wiki plugin. With this plugin you can easily use WordPress to create a simple wiki. Members Members is a free plugin from Justin Tadlock that focuses on user, role and content management. It improves upon the standard user role system of WordPress by allowing you fine-grain control over the users and who sees what content. You can edit roles, create new roles, set content permissions and more. TDO Mini Forms TDO Mini Forms is a popular and powerful plugin that can allow users and visitors to submit posts. It is commonly used for user-submitted news sections. There are a lot of different features and options that make it possible to do a lot of different things with the plugin. This video shows just one example of what is possible with TDO Mini Forms – a wiki-like site that allows visitors to post and edit their own song lyrics. WP e-Commerce WP e-Commerce is a feature-rick plugin that will allow you to transform a WordPress website or blog into an e-Commerce site. It provides buyers with a one-page checkout and integrates with popular payment gateways. Premium upgrades are also available to extend the functionality. eShop eShop is another popular, free plugin for building an e-Commerce site with WordPress. It includes a number of features including integration with popular payment gateways, sell downloadable or physical goods, email templates, out-of-stock messages, and more. Simple:Press Simple:Press is a free plugin to use WordPress for powering a forum. It includes many features like integration with WordPress’ users/logins, ability to create private forums, a private messaging system, a built-in search tool, and more. Business Directory WordPress can also be used to create a directory site with the Business Directory plugin. The directory can be inserted into one of your WordPress pages and visitors can submit a form for inclusion in the directory. Submissions can be managed from the WP dashboard. Calendar Event calendars are a critical component for some types of websites (i.e. bands, sports teams, non-profit organizations). With the calendar plugin you can easily add a feature-rich calendar to a WordPress-based site.

What Are Your Favorite Plugins?

Feel free to leave a comment mentioning the plugins that are most important for your sites or blogs. This post is supported by Web Designer Depot Webdesigner Depot is one of the most popular web design blogs in the world. It covers tutorials, design trends, blogging as well as inspirational posts. It’s run by Walter Apai, a web designer from Vancouver, Canada. The blog is a great resource for both beginners and advanced designers looking to expand and improve their knowledge. The site is visited by Fortune 500 companies and is used as a reference by many design schools. Visited by almost 2 million readers per month, WDD is a prime resource for both graphic and web designers. Visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com. Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/designerdepot. Subscribe to RSS feed: webdesignerdepot.com/rss.htm.

Reading over a post at MarketingVox, a real interesting post titled, “Retweets, Mentions and Followers: Managing Twitter, part 2,” covered some good ground on Twitter tools you can use that may really help you analyze and measure your Twitter success. The one factor that has many small-medium size business owner is measuring if Twitter is a waste of time or really does bring good value to the marketing strategy. As much as I agree that Twitter is very important to an overall marketing campaign, it shouldn’t be the focus of all, specially if you’re limited on resources. Here are a couple of Twitter tools that can help you out as posted in the article: 1) ReTweetRank: “measures the amount of retweets about you or your post per day, and try and which can be used it to compare your retweet rating against your competitors or peers.” 2) Twinfluence: “allows marketers to track how many of their followers are actually listening to their messages. “It helps to track the rate at which your campaign is growing among other metrics.” 3) TweetEffect: “lets a marketer track how many people are responding and reacting to posts. “This helps you identify what is and what isn’t resonating with your followers,” she says.”

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Shared by louisgray
Good overview from Thomas. I say I connect to my Google services with my Apple hardware.

Years ago I used to only use Google to do internet searches. Slowly but surely though Google has been taking over more and more and more of my computing life. This is not a bad thing, this is a good thing. Google makes things that make my life easier and their corporate values are more in synch with my own than most publicly traded companies. I’ve especially noticed in the past six months that the trend of Google taking over my computing life has accelerated dramatically. This could have to do with the time I’ve been spending on Buzz, but some of the changes (like changing my internet browser) have involved big chunks of my computing experience.

Below is a loose chronology of the evolution of my experience with Google Products.

1. Search (can’t remember exactly when, but years ago), got off Yahoo pretty early in the game and switched to Google. Google has the best search on the web today. I appreciate Google’s more open nature than other search engines and their better track record when it comes to keeping the web uncensored.

2. Blogger. Used Blogger since 2003. Abandoned Blogger for WordPress last year, mostly due to Blogger’s inability to deal effectively with comment spam.

3. Google Analytics. Still use this. It’s free which is good. I’ve never really gotten what I want and need out of this product though. It’s complicated to build things for me. The two most important things I want from a stats package are the number of page views and referring url information. My view I’m most interested in is the past 24 hours. Before Analytics I used Sitemeter. I liked Site Meter’s analytics product much more, but you have to pay for that and Google Analytics is free.

I get the sense that Google Analytics is a bit like Photoshop for me. You can do anything and everything with it, but I’m still only using about 2% of its true potential.

4. Google Docs. I’m a lightweight user of word processing and spreadsheets, so this works just fine for me. Replaces the need to buy expensive software from Microsoft to do this sort of work for the casual user like me.

5. Google Maps. I used to use Mapquest and Yahoo Maps. Now I use Google Maps exclusively. It’s the best mapping software on the web. I use it *very* heavily when traveling.

6. YouTube. Like everybody I’m on it. I rarely use it though. Occasionally I’ll consume content on it. It takes so much time to watch YouTube videos though. It’s probably the internet site that my kids use more than any other site on the internet though. My son Jackson has spent hours on there learning how to do Yo Yo tricks. One of these days I’m going to have to get him a Google Yo Yo. Actually I just ordered him a green one and a yellow one. He’ll love them. I used Google Checkout to buy them from Google (not sure why the shipping charge is more than the yoyos though).

7. Google Earth. I don’t use Google Earth a lot. I find it a bit unweildy actually. But I do use it to do the geotagging with Geotagger for my photos.

8. Gmail, part 1. Unfortunately I was late to the game with Gmail. So alas, I’m thomashawk22 instead of thomashawk. I got a gmail account and then never really used it. A few years back though I was getting so much spam email that I began filtering thomashawk.com email through gmail first to filter out all of the spam. That worked tremendously well. My spam pretty much went away entirely overnight. So I was using Google gmail as a passive filter for my Mac mail reader for about 2 years. Part 2, later.

In the past six months.

9. Google Buzz. Buzz has really become my primary social network. I still use a number of different social networks (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed), but Buzz now gets the bulk of my social networking time and attention. One of my favorite things about Buzz is that it shows photos *really* well. You can feed your Flickr feed into it and if people click on the thumbnails they blow up huge to get an easy big view. There’s a link to Flickr included that I can cmd click to go fave the photo on Flickr too.

The majority of my faves that I’m faving on Flickr these days are coming from Google Buzz. If you haven’t hooked your Flickrstream up to a Buzz account yet you are missing out. Even if you aren’t going to use Buzz, don’t have time for another social network, etc. You should still at least hook up your Flickrstream to it so that people can see your Flickr photos there and get back to your stream via Buzz.

10. PicasaWeb. I’ve had an account on Picasa for years, but just never really used it. I’ve started using it much more though. Presently I’m maxed out my free storage there so I’m just using it to host small sized screenshot files and deleting my larger high res photos as I need space. I’ve thought about paying the $5 to buy more ($5 is really totally insignificant for me to pay) but I need Picasa to convince me as a product first why I should do that.

If Picasa had photostreams and SmartSet technology I’d totally pay. But as it stands today, it’s too much work organizing my photos there manually without SmartSets and it feels to me like the photosharing community is still very much at Flickr. I do use the service though almost daily to host my screenshots.

11. Google Profiles. I like having a profile page on Google and look forward to seeing them continue expanding this product. You can find my Google Profile here.

12. Google Chrome. After a rocky marriage with Firefox for many years we finally split up a few months ago. Google Chrome is just a far better, faster, more stable web browser.

13. GMail, part 2. I haven’t opened my Mac Mail application for about a month now. I’ve been consuming all of my email directly from gmail on the web. Mostly it’s just faster to do email this way. So now it is not only my passive spam filter, it’s my main mail application that I use to consume all of my email.

14. Picnik. Probably technically not a Google Product yet, but acquired by Google recently so I’m including it. I just bought a Pro account there for $24.95 for a year. I did it just because I was curious about what you could do there more than anything. I don’t think I’ll renew it after my year is up based on what I saw. I didn’t really see anything there that I can’t already do in Lightroom or Photoshop. But for someone who doesn’t want to spend the money for Lightroom/Photoshop, this seems like an excellent way to go. You really can do quite a bit for $25 a year.

I need to play around with Picnik a bit more though. Maybe it will grow on me. Google should consider giving away the Pro version in Picasa to get more people on there.

15. Google Calendar. After using 30 Boxes for many years I switched to Google Calendar. Not sure why really. 30 Boxes was working just fine. I think I like Google Calendar better. I like how now that I’ve synched it up with my iPhone that I get a little notification from my iPhone calendar 10 minutes before I’ve got an appointment.

16. Google Chrome URL shortener. this is kind of a minor little tool. Not a product really. But I love it so much that I wanted to include it. You just click on a little icon in Chrome and it automatically copies a shorter url to your clipboard.

The future.

So what’s next for me in terms of adopting Google products. I’m not sure exactly but here are a few ideas.

Android. I suspect that when my contract with AT&T ends in July that I’ll likely switch to a Google phone of some sort. They seem to be ahead of Apple right now, are a more open company. And I can’t stand how poor AT&T’s 3G network is in San Francisco.

Chrome OS. This will be an interesting one. Switching your OS is huge. It took me years to get off Windows and on to my Mac about 5 years ago. Overall I’m pretty happy with my Mac. Still I paid over $3,000 for my last MacBook Pro. Chrome would seem to make computing cheaper. I don’t know enough about Chrome to really blog about it, but if I can install it on my MacBook Pro when it comes out (later this year?) to check it out I definitely will. Apple’s OS is pretty damn solid though, so I think this switch for me will be a harder one.