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5 Audio Player WordPress Plugins

John — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:55:09 +0000

It is a very good idea to have an audio player on a WordPress blog to offer a nice track of music or allow people to choose music to listen to on your blog while they read. This can be customized with a simple plugin that offers audio player functionality.

Audio Player – This plugin offers a stylish audio player functionality to your WordPress blog which can be easily customized to play an audio file of your choosing.

WS Audio Player – This is a nice plugin that adds an audio player with a download function to your blog. Very useful for bands or any other group that offers music or sound effects as a promotional tool.

1 Bit Audio Player – This is an adobe flash based audio player that offers automatic JavaScript insertion into your blog. Allows you to make easy preview sounds for music or anything else you may be offering on your blog.

Mu (Micro) Audio Player – This is a very nice plugin that is so tiny at 450 bytes, that is used to create a small flash based player for MP3 file links that are clicked. It also fades in and out when the player is clicked to remove or show on the page.

SSG WordPress Google Audio Player – This is an advanced tool that allows you to seek out audio from Google searches and play them on your WordPress blog. Has an auto configuration feature that is very easy to use.

5 Sticky Posts WordPress Plugins

John — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:54:26 +0000

Sticky posts are a great way to keep a more important post up on top of your post listings to ensure that readers are able to see the post first when visiting your WordPress blog. You can easily make posts into stickies with special plugins.

WP Sticky – This is a plugin designed to make it simple to make a post a sticky on your WordPress blog. It is very useful for creating stickies very quickly when needed.

Jadedcoder Sticky Permalinks – This is a very useful plugin to make a sticky permalink, no matter how many times you change it. This is useful because people may bookmark (or social bookmark) your page and go to it later when the permalink has changed.

Simple Sticky Posts – This is a very easy to use sticky post feature for WordPress blogs. This is a simple and lightweight to use for any blog.

Admin Show Sticky – This is a very useful tool for those who need to know which posts are stickies. This allows administrators to see that a post is a sticky by a checkmark by the post title.

A Sticky Post Order ER Show Sticky – This is a very simple plugin that works right on installation. It creates another table column that notifies the admin whether or not a post is a sticky.

5 Navigation Menu Plugins

John — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:53:38 +0000

Navigation menus are very useful in providing a way for readers of a WordPress blog to find their way around the site. It is important to allow for WordPress blog readers to make their way around with ease so that they can find the content they wish to see.

WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT – This is a specialized plugin tool that allows you to have complete control over your navigation system. It also includes a drag and drop interface that is very useful to make it quick and easy.

Bob’s Simplistic Navigation – This is a great plugin that allows WordPress bloggers that do not have the PHP knowledge to create their own forward and back links to separate blog posts, do so.

Bread Crumb Navigation XT – This is a great tool that allows readers of your blog to know where they came from to get to the current page that they are visiting. It is very useful for those who do not wish to click the back button on their browser so many times to return to a previous post.

Multiple Level Navigation Plugin – This is a very valuable tool that is able to give a drop down menu to different pages of your WordPress blog. It is very customizable and can be custom tailored to your blog needs.

Flexible Navigation – This is a great plugin that is designed to allow accordion style link management in the sidebar. This is very useful for those blogs that have tons of links in their sidebars.

5 Search Enhancement WordPress Plugins

John — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:51:55 +0000

Search enhancement plugins are very important for WordPress as they allow multiple enhancements on making searches within the page. This can be beneficial for search engines as well by making the page searchable.

Search Engine Query in WordPress – This little gem makes it possible to suggest items from your WordPress posts that offer suggestions for related posts when a reader comes in through a search engine.

Extended Search Box – Offers advanced javascript services to the search box. Increased functionality of the search can be possible with this easy to use plugin. This option is available for any and all WordPress blogs with the plugin.

TextWise Similarity Search – creates better posts by using a similarity search. It suggests related content as you write and makes it possible to better tailor your content for search engines.

Twitter Search Widget – Offers the ability to search Twitter with extended features. This is great for websites that have a twitter account attached to them.

Google Analyticator – Allows you to use Google analytics by adding the necessary javascript needed to have the pages logged by Google. This is useful to see what topics are most responsive and should be written more about.

5 Paypal Donation Plugins for WordPress

John — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:51:03 +0000

Whether you need the money to keep your WordPress site running or you offer something for free and would like to offer your viewers a chance to donate, PayPal plugins are an excellent tool to receive donations.

WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin – This plugin allows you to create a donations page or post where you give your readers the ability to make donations in any amount they wish. This is very useful for blogs that offer free software or other goodies.

WordPress PayPal Donation – This is a very customizable WordPress plugin that is designed to allow you to put the PayPal button wherever you want. It comes with easy to use [PayPal] smart tag as well for individual posts.

Simple PayPal Donate – This is more of a tutorial on how to integrate the PayPal button onto your WordPress site. It allows you to bypass the need to install a plugin and work it through the actual process that is meant for PayPal donation buttons.

PayPal Donations – This allows you to add a PayPal shortcode that is easy to use for posts and other pages within your WordPress blog. It is useful for any blog that needs donations for any reason.

PayPal Donation Shortcode – Uses the [paypal] shortcode smart tag that allows you to place your PayPal donation button. You can edit nearly everything with this plugin for your button and how it functions as well.

WordPress Search: Best Practices

John — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:29:20 +0000

It’s not often you find articles related to WordPress search on the web for some reason. I don’t know why is this the case, but I’ll try to fill that gap here. Read below to find useful information on how and why it is important to add a good WordPress search box for your blog.

Why is a Good Search Box Important For Your Blog?

There are 3 reasons:

More repeated readers. If your users are searching for something, type their query and receive no results, they usually leave.
Better user experience. Important for getting more loyal visitors.
You’ll know what they search for and learn a ton from that data. I will later share with you one example where I’ve learned one surprising thing about my visitors from just tracking what they searched for on my blog.

WordPress Standard Search – Avoid It

Using the WordPress Standard search box is the worst option. In my experience the WordPress standard search returns very few relevant results. It can decently handle 1-word queries (if you type ‘people’ for example) but for more complex queries it’s terrible.

If you still want to use the standard search box for WordPress then I recommend you get the following plugins:

Why is it important to track what people are searching for? Allow me to share one story.

Several months ago, I was researching and writing a list of people search engines which soon became the most popular article on the entire blog. I started received tons of traffic and realized I could make use of that opportunity by analyzing the behavior of some of the people who came to the site and possibly gaining new insights.

So I installed a plugin like Search Meter (unfortunately that plugin is no longer working now so can’t really recommend it) and was SHOCKED to see that 99% of the people typed NAMES into the search box (I had 0 posts that mentioned any name)! Upon further investigation I saw that most people search sites worked this way, you just type a name and get results. Mine was different, mine was a people search help website (providing advice) but that didn’t stop people from typing names in the search box.

Lesson learned: People were used to the typical format of a typical people search site and expected mine to be no different (for your niche and industry, you may discover some even more surprising insights).

For me, I tried this on some other sites as well and always received types of searches I didn’t expect (which later gave me ideas for new articles etc.)

Google/Bing-Powered Search

Nowadays WordPress comes with a default widget where you can put a custom Google code and have your blog search powered by Google. There are many tutorials in case you don’t know how to do this, just type ‘add Google custom search in WordPress’ on Google and you’ll get a bunch of good articles.

Bing is a search engine from Microsoft (in case you’ve been living under a rock) and also gives you an option to add a ‘bing custom search’ that will allow visitors to search your site only. To do that, go to their advanced search page, complete the 3 steps and after that you’ll be given some HTML code.

Now, add a text widget to your blog sidebar (its description is “Arbitrary text or HTML”) and voila! I’ve tried this on my blog and here are the results:

Here you get the results as a ‘pop-up’ window. If you want it to be in a separate location, this WordPress Codex article gives you more info.

Action plan:

First, install Search Meter and Search Everything. See what are visitors searching for on your blog.

Second, decide between Google and Bing. I personally prefer Google custom search because they offer an easy option to track what people are searching for.

If you found this article helpful, let us know in the comments below!

About the Author :
I am Darren, a writer with 3+ years experience. I write mostly on web-design related topics

5 Comments Plugins for WordPress

John — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:50:25 +0000

Comment plugins are designed to help you do various things with the ability to comment. There are also some plugins that have other useful features for comments that may be needed on your blog.

Cap Comments – This plugin is designed to cut the ability for commenting once a certain number of comments is reached. This prevents spam and allows you to moderate out rubbish comments as well.

Comment Count – This is a useful plugin that allows the comment number to be included as well as the ability to count how many comments have been left for a post on your blog

Comment Plugger – This allows people to leave their comments with a link to their website if they have provided one. This helps to spread knowledge of other sites through your comments.

Comment Word Count – Allows you to display the total number of words for all comments. It can be used to help those who comment to consciously limit their comment size.

Edit Comments – This is a special plugin that allows comments to be edited by the same person who posted. This is only possible if the person has the same IP address when they decide to edit their post.

5 Post Template WordPress Plugins

John — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:49:29 +0000

Templates make it possible to quickly create styled posts that do not require much more than writing the content and adding in your images. This makes it much simpler for many writers, especially if they create their post templates by hand and want it ready for use right away.

Post Templates – This changes the post template for individual posts or even for entire categories if you specify. This is very useful for blogs that need to change the default template for their posts quickly.

Simple Post Template – This plugin allows bloggers to really take advantage of their posting format by adding a template to their posts. It is highly customizable and easy to use.

Custom Post Template – This is a versatile post template plugin that has increased functionality. Allows you to create different post templates and offers a drop down menu to select the one you wish to use easily.

Single Post Template – Easy to use template manager that offers a drop down list of preconfigured templates. Very useful for a blog that has many different styles of posts but requires help with templates.

Serial Posts – This is a tool that can be used to create special templates to use with your WordPress blog. It is complicated, but can easily do much more with your blog posts once configured properly.

5 Analytics WordPress Plugins

John — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:48:26 +0000

Analytics of your WordPress site are important because they offer you the ability to analyze traffic and other statistics about your website. The added benefit of this is that you can easily learn what is bringing in the most traffic to your website so that you can add more related content.

Google Analyticator – A useful plugin tool that is designed to offer you the ability to insert the Google JavaScript needed to your page to properly be used with Google analytics.

Ultimate Google Analytics – This plugin allows you to add the needed JavaScript without the need to make changes to your site template. Very useful for any WordPress blog that needs statistics tracked through Google.

Going Up! Web Analytics – This is a free web analytics application that can be used to track live data as it happens on your site. It uses tools like “site spy” which offers these capabilities.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin is designed to automatically track all links and segments for everything through Google analytics. This is a very useful tool if you need to know where your traffic is going after they visit you.

AdCenter Analytics – This is designed to add the Microsoft AdCenter tag to your WordPress blog. It is very useful to track clicks and other statistical data.

5 Podcasting Plugins for WordPress

John — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:47:40 +0000

Many companies make use of podcasting which is simply a way of distributing information through sound clips or videos that can be used on popular devices such as the Apple iPod.

Podcasting – This plugin takes a file from anywhere on the web and offers it through an iTunes like feed on your WordPress blog. This is useful to also play the file on the web with a special player that is included.

Podcasting – Blubrry PowerPress Podcast Plugin – This is a plugin designed to offer full podcast support through iTunes and offers a large amount of customizable interfaces. It was created for podcasters by podcasters.

MTR Podcast Recorder – This is a special WordPress plugin designed to pull real time data and save it to the WordPress installation location. All sound information is saved in MP3 format with the famous LAME encoder.

Podcast Channels – This plugin allows blog owners to offer podcast feed channels on their WordPress blog. Offers increased functionality with Meta data which could be changed by readers as well on their own machine.

PodPress – This WordPress plugin allows you to add additional features to the WordPress design which can be easily put to use as the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.