Earlier this week we launched a new website for Oxfordshire based business, House & Carriage. The website has received fantastic feedback . . .
“Your site looks great, just the ticket! V.simple, easy to follow and well executed.”
After reading Blueprint Design Studio’s blog post Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins I started to ponder what other plugins I would add to their list. At Oxeye Daisy we have used WordPress as a content management system for a few clients. Nothing comes close to it’s ease of use and simplicity to install and maintain. We’ve looked at ‘proper’ CMSs but they are generally over the top for our customers needs.
So, here are our additions:
Useful for hiding all the more complicated admin options. We tend to use it for preventing page deletions of top level site pages, things that may make the site unusable if allowed.
The biggest problem we generally encounter with WordPress is how it handles images. This plugin removes the reliance on customers learning to resize images themselves. We tend to use a modified version of this plugin which prevents anyone but the admin user from being able to change the image size settings. Image size is generally part of the site design and not generally something to be changed willy-nilly.
An invaluable plugin for optimising page titles which helps with search engines. This separates what appears in the browser title bar on a page from what is used as its button name in the navigation. Also allows for adding of keywords.
Used for tidying the WordPress Dashboard. We remove the WordPress Planet feeds and put in a simple menu to direct customers to the admin pages they will most like use, like page editing or updating their profile. Removing the feeds also makes the admin load a lot faster.
Whilst catching up on my blog feeds this morning I found a link to a web based image editor called Splashup. It needs your browser to have the Flash plugin installed but most do these days so that shouldn’t be a problem. A really nice feature is its integration with Facebook, and both Flickr and Picasa online photo galleries, you can resize or crop your pictures and save them directly to your account.
There are quite a few tools to play about with including text editing, filters, different brushes and layers. Even if you have an image editor installed on your computer its worth bookmarking as something like this is useful to have as a backup.
Take a look at Splashup.
AddThis is a little set of unobtrusive buttons that you add to your website or blog to enable your visitors to easily bookmark your content. They offer both subscribe and bookmark buttons. When the visitor clicks on these they will see links to several of the well known online RSS readers or social bookmark sites respectively. Using AddThis means you no longer have to second guess which services your visitors are using or leave them drowning in a sea of links. To see AddThis is action visit the Your Tomorrow blog.
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