WordPress Web Design:

Last week Jay and I had a great discussion on More than a Few Words, (our weekly podcast) about WordPress plugins. We asked for suggestions from the community on twitter and facebook and built a great list to add to our favorites.

We have been using WordPress as the foundation of our web design business for several years and thought we had a pretty good list of standard plug ins.  But this program helped expand our list.  There were so many good suggestions, we had a hard time, narrowing down which ones we would talk about.  We might have to do another show on this topic later this year.

Some of our favorites included: Social Metric.  I found this plugin in a blog post  by Adam Small, a writer for Marketing Tech blog. At a glance you can see how social your blog is; which posts are liked, tweeted, stumbled or mentioned on LinkedIn.It creates a great comprehensive list of statistics and you have the ability to post to any of the major networks right from your dashboard, giving a little extra love to specific posts.

Will Hardison, of MediaPlug suggested we take a look at LiveChat.  This is a terrific addition for anyone who needs to have this functionality as part of their website.

In the process of researching wordpress plugins for this show, our intern Scott came across many great sources. Lorelle VanFossen, a self-proclaimed plugin slut, her words, not mine has an entire blog full of plug in reviews.  I am going to be adding her blog to my reader, so I can stay on top of the latest tools.

Another interesting set of plugins came from Nicholas Cardot . Thank Me Later creates an automated message to anyone who comments for the first time on your blog.  We received one of these messages, and it was warm and personal.  It wasn’t until we went back to his site, and researched his other recommendations did we discover it was automated. By then we were already engaged in a real time email conversation with Nicholas, and that was the point.

Steve Shattuck  also suggested Zip Compression, which I had never heard of, but you can see the details here.

Want to learn more?  You will have to listen to the rest of the pod cast here: