I’ve finally finished installing and tweaking my new blog… what do you think?!

My old blog theme was starting to look a bit tired, but the main reason for the change was less to do with aesthetics and more to do with function and ease of navigation.

I’d tweaked so much code in the old one, that it was also taking an age to load and certainly didn’t like me adding any plugins to it!

I’ve tried to keep it simple this time as I wanted a cleaner, less ‘busy’ look.

If you’d like to create a similar looking blog, then I highly recommend the Flexibility Theme – It’s free and is really easy to customise the layout and colours – it also allows you to add your own custom graphics in the header, background etc. so you can make it really unique to you.  All without editing the code.

I’ve also added some cool plugins to allow people to share my content and also to allow me to manage my blog more easily.

Listed below are all the plugins I currently have installed and I recommend you try them out to improve your blog looks and functionality.  (I’d like to give a shout out here to a fellow MWA student, Paul Lear, as he put together a great list of plugins, which helped me – Thanks Paul! – if you don’t know how to install plugins, Paul also has a video showing you how here)

Ok, here’s the list and the links to the download sites :-

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Click here to go to download page

All in One SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Pack

Optimises your blog to make it more easily found by the search engines.  All you do is activate the plugin it and it will search the content of your blog and automatically create relevant keywords and phrases that people may search for.  (As you can probably tell, I don’t know much about SEO! – Put simply, if you use this plugin, you should get more traffic!)

Click here to go to download page

CommentLuv

Shows a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments and therefore a more active community.

Click here to go to download page

Contact Form 7

Allows your readers to contact you, without you having to reveal your email to every spammer in the world.  It also looks more professional than “Contact Me at JoeBloggs@hotmail.com”

Click here to go to download page

Google Analytics for WordPress

This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your blog without having to manually edit code.  Once added, login to your Google account to check web traffic stats etc. It also allows you to download tracking to your WordPress blog.

Click here to go to download page

Post Teaser

Post Teaser generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.  It allows your visitors to scroll through all your recent posts more quickly to find something that interests them and in my experience means they’ll stay for longer on your site.

Click here to go to download page

SexyBookmarks

SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts allowing them to be shared, thereby increasing your traffic.

Click here to go to download page

Top Commentators Widget

Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Visually it creates a sense of community and interactivity and so encourages users to post comments.

Click here to go to download page

TweetMeme Retweet Button (Yes, thats really what it’s called!)

Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Click here to go to download page

WordPress Database Backup

On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Ok, not as exciting as some of the others maybe, but I think it’s a gem because backing up manually via c-panel can be a real pain in the neck – And it’s better to be safe than sorry!

Click here to go to download page

WP-Cumulus

My favourite – A Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress which spins your tags when a visitor hovers over them.  Probably encourages people to stay longer on your blog, but to be honest, I just think it looks cool!

Click here to go to download page

They’re all the plugins I have installed at the moment.  Feel free to comment below if you’ve found any other cool/useful plugins you’d like to share.

Now it’s time to start filling up this blog with more great content :)

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