Can't-Live-Without WordPress Plugins

The debate rages among bloggers surrounding what are must-have plugins for WordPress. Naturally, everyone has their personal preferences that depend on what they are trying to accomplish by blogging. But I was rather horrified to read a forum post discussing WordPress plugins stating that all you need in the way of plugins, “if you have good content”, were All in One SEO Pack Google XML Sitemaps and StatPress. Now, these are great plugins and I use them all on everyone of my sites. But to say that these three are all you need, regardless of not whether your content is good, bad or mediocre, is, well, just wrong. If you want to increase your on page SEO; decrease your page load time (a key factor for ranking in Google with their latest algorithm change); hide your affiliate links and find and remove lines of code or text quickly and easily and more you need a few more plugins in your arsenal. Here is my top-ten list of great WordPress Plugins. These are all free plugins. 1) All-in-One SEO Pack–This plugin helps your SEO right out of the box, without any configuration. To increase your on-page SEO, it allows you to add title, description and keywords to make your posts more search engine friendly, but it’s not a requirement. 2) WP-Super Cache–A caching plugin is a must with Google’s new emphasis on page load speed. WP-Super Cache allows logged in users to disable caching, which is important if you are trying to do some editing on your site without the pages constantly

WordPress Theme Tutorial: Part 2 – Homepage and Functions

In HD! Post your thoughts on the quality. This part of the tutorial shows you how to build the homepage for your website, while introducing several important WordPress core functions in the process. See codex.wordpress.org for more info. Files Used in Lesson (as of Part 3): andrewanimation.biz (Note: The index.php does NOT change in Part 3, so you are safe to use this .zip as a guide.)