The Publishers Den

After you have selected the theme you want to use for your new website, you should take some time and get basic plugins that will help improve your sites performance and functionality.   Some of the first plugins I grab are:

• site map plugin.  I use XML-Sitemap.  You will need a site map if you want to use webmaster tools to keep track of how your site is doing, what pages/post are indexing etc… it is overall the easiest way to submit your site to search engines. Of course you don’t have to and a lot of the time, search engines will index without it.
• SEO pack.  I think the most popular SEO plugin is the All in one SEO.  With it you would put in all your meta key words and meta descriptions about your site.
• Anti-virus
• backup, if you don’t have access to the server you can use a database backup plug in.

If you use adsense, getting some sort of adsense plugin is helpful so you don’t have to put in codes every time you write a new post/page.  Generally, you put in your tracking id and you can either configure it to place those ads where you want them automatically or it will give a short code that you can place manually in your site.

Amazon is another good one.  Pulling links off your Amazon account is easy but they don’t always look that flattering and sometimes you just want to lel Amazon choose the products for you.  Either way, they generally turn out more ascetically pleasing and are easier to use.

For bloggers, using the social sharing plugins is a really great way to share your work with social networking sites like twitter, facebook, digg, and stumbleupon etc…

Plugins are a lot of fun, sometimes however, the plugins don’t always work right and after you have activated your plugin, an error will occur and you will probably panic because you cannot get back into your site because of it.  No worries.  If that ever happens and you can try two things.

1. Try logging into to your dashboard through wordpress.org.  If you can get in that way, remove the plugin you just activated.
2. If you cannot log into your dashboard you will have to log into your server and follow the right file path to remove the plugin.

• The file path is the route you take to open up a file or upload a file into the right directory.  It should generally go something like this:
• root,  the root (depending on how many sites you have)  would be the name of your website.
• wp-content
• plugins

Then you would look for the name of the plugin you just installed and delete it.  Be careful that you have the right one.  This is also how it would work when uploading photos or dowloads into your site.  You would follow a similar path but instead it would be /wp-content/wp-themes/name of the theme you are using/images.   Once you get used to the file paths it’s pretty easy to navigate.

So when you see something on your theme that says upload images to such and such file path, you know what it means.