“You must have a Blog!” Ok, but how?

If you are serious about building a web presence, sooner or later someone will convince you that you must have a blog of your own.

Great advice, but how should you go about it? You may choose to have someone do the donkey work for you, or you may decide to create your own, with perhaps some help with the branding and graphics.

I tried several of the major platforms – Mambo, Joomla and WordPress to name but three, before I settled on WordPress and it has proved to be a wise choice. Why? Because more and more bloggers are using it so it is very well supported with a plethora of free and commercially produced themes and plugins. In fact, there are so many options that it can be extremely confusing for the newcomer to the WordPress world. In this article, I’m going to look at some of the quality, free, themes and plugins. I will not be giving advice on how to install WordPress(WP)  as there is lots of advice available on that, not least from the WP website.

So, I’m assuming that you have WP installed and running smoothly, that you know your way around the options on the left of the admin screen and understand the role of plugins in WP.

Theme – Suffusion 3.0.6

This is a free theme with a lot of similarities with a  high quality premium (ie you have to pay for it) theme called ‘Thesis’. Suffusion gives the user a great deal of flexibility and is one of the hidden gems of the WP world. You can find it by clicking on ‘Appearance’/Add New Themes and putting Suffusion in the search box. It’s straightforward, powerful and even has its own support forum here.

Must-Have Plug Ins

Everyone has their own opinion abouttheir favourite plugins; I’m not going to produce an exhaustive list, just those that I’ve found to be very helpful.

Contact Form 7

I’ve looked at several contact form plugins and I like this one as it’s simple and flexible. Even the default form which asks for name, e-mail address of sender, subject and message is good enough for most people.  In addition, you then get almot endless options for customisation. Essential, as you need to provide your readers with a way to contact you!

StatPress Reloaded

Sooner or later youwill want to find out who is visiting your site, where they’ve come from, which pages they visit most. StatPress Reloaded gives you this overview plus info on the feeds used, the last hits, last search terms, last spiders and last pages. And that’s just scrathcing the surface of the information this plugin provides.

Google XML Sitemap

The purpose of a Sitemap is to let search engines do their bit and raise a site’s ranking profile. The most important of these is Google and this plugin lets you builda sitemap with just one click, using the default settings. For those who like to have their own settings, there are loads of additional options.

MP3 Player Plugin

Self-explanatory title, it does exactly what it says on the tin. It only supports the mp3 format and is very easy to set up and operate. A must if you include sound files on your site.

TweetBlender

If you want to include your recent Tweets on your site, this allows you to display them in a format that’s great to look at.  The plugin has a lot of features including the ability to switch your photo on/off, show tweets for multiple authors, and display any number of Tweets between 1 and 10.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin offers your blog Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box!

WordPressbackup

I’ve only just started using this, having had it recomended to me by William Buist. It does exactly what it says and allows you to do a backup now and to schedule them regularly, with the file sent to your e-mail address of choice.

If I’ve missed any that you conside to be indispensible, please let me know!

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