Plugins Help You Never (Gasp, Shudder) Touch Code
This post was originally published for my fellow ginger, Kevin Ekmark.
We have a fascination with WordPress plugins—handy programs installed on our site in the blink of an eye to add features and never (gasp, heart palpitations, sweaty palms) have to touch code .
Grab your mouse, or pen and paper…
I’m sharing some of my favorite plugins
TinyMCE Advanced (pronounced “tiny mice”) adds additional features to the default tool bar you see when writing a post or page in WordPress.
Two features I especially like are the ability to:
- quickly add a table to keep pesky images exactly where you want them to display, construct columns, data spreadsheets and more
- stop WordPress from stripping the <p> and <br /> tags from the HTML
EXTRA CREDIT if you know what the last icon on the right is named and the action taken when you click there. Go now. Login to your site, click the icon and come back leave your answer in the comments. I’ll wait…
WordPress SEO by Yoast is a robust SEO plugin which improves your site’s SEO on all needed aspects and helps you write better content.
The settings to take care of all the technical optimization appear overwhelming at first glance. Simply follow the tutorials here or here.
Be sure to download a free 27-page SEO report on how to create compelling content that ranks well in the search engines.
The Easiest Way to Connect Around the ‘Net
The Social Media Widget adds links to all your social media networks in a sidebar widget. Yes, the images are included. You simply provide the URL for each of your social networking profiles, choose the size of the images you want and save. Easy-peasy!
If you are just getting started with your WordPress site and don’t yet understand plugins and widgets, you are not alone. Don’t be embarrassed.