5 Plugins to Make Your Site Look More Professional

Oct 17, 2008 Blogging, Tips & Tools

One of the reasons I love WordPress is the plethora of amazing plugins available. Here are 5 plugins that I recommend for getting a professional look to your site:

Featured Content Gallery

This plugin is amazing. It’s so easy to implement and really makes a big difference in a static site. Check out this site or this one to see it in action. To use, you simply install the plugin, and then set your preferences in the admin panel, add the bit of code to your theme files, and start posting in your featured category including the use of the custom field for the featured image. Just an FYI, for you techie types, I have found that this plugin does not work on a site that is also using “Moo Tools” javascripts. Click here to visit download page.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT

Another simple one to implement and a must if you have a site of any depth. It ads “breadcrumb” links to make it easy for the user to navigate, especially as they get deep into your content. Click here to visit download page.

Multi-page Toolkit

If you have content that is quite lengthy, this is a perfect plugin to help your users wade through it. There are many options for customizing it in the admin panel, and you can style the display by adding some plugin specific CSS to your theme’s stylesheet. Check out this post for an good example, and click here for the download page.

Related Entries

This plugin gives your readers suggestions at the end of each post for other posts that may interest them, and is a great way to increase the time they stay on your site. You can even include exerpts if you like! Click here to visit the download page.

CForms

This is simply the best contact form plugin I have ever come across. It allows for multiple forms, custom form styling and it’s very easy to insert your forms into posts, pages or your sidebar. Download page is here.

And, while I’m in plugin mode, here are some plugins I couldn’t live without:

Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu

102 Responses

Ani K says:

November 30, 2008 at 1:59 am

Hi! Thanks for plugins.

I Loved the ‘Related Entries’ plugin. Its quite powerful to keep visitors of your blog for longer period time. Reason – visitor read their favourite topic and at the end of the post they see a other link equivalent to stuff they just read. It Rocks !
Gungesh says:

December 2, 2008 at 11:35 am

I;m fairly new to thie Wordpress thing as I was using the Blogger before for blogs.though I knew it is flexible for thos who are techincal but your article gives a sigh of relief that it has some inbuilt plug-ins(hope they are out of box). also, the back-up thingy was an eye-opener and I’ve already downloaded it.
will surely benefit from your wordpress knowledge