1. My new favorite plugin is Lighter Menus by corpodibacco. With 2.5.1 the administrative side of things changed. I found it confusing and annoying to get where I wanted to go. The Lighter Menus plugin puts all the admin navigation in a tidy little drop down bar at the top.

2. I’ve always liked Search Everything by Dan Cameron, and it deserves a place on this list just because it’s so handy. When people visit a site where WordPress is used primarily for a CMS with a blog, rather than as a blog alone, being able to search everything is essential. It’s also nice that you can define what “search everything” means to you, excluding tags, for example, if you don’t want them searched as well.

3. WordPress Stats by Andy Skelton is next. You have to have a WordPress.com API key to use it, but it makes things easy if you want to keep an eye on which of your posts are getting the most traffic and where the traffic is coming from. It’s not a full-fledged Google toolbox, but it’s a handy little gadget, especially useful when someone doesn’t want to have to manage a full-fledged Google toolbox. Andy is also the author of the Bad Behavior plugin which my husband loves. I rely on Akismet for now (which he also helped build. Way to go Andy!).

4. Akismet (of course). Akismet is the spam protection plugin that learns. It comes packed with every install of WordPress so the only thing you need to do to use it is give it the API key you’ve already gotten to turn on Stats. Designed by Andy Skelton, Matt (whose website is worth a visit just because it’s so beautiful), and MDA.

5. WP-chgFontSize by Ferran Rodenas I like this plugin because not everyone can read at 10px (or .5 em, or 50%) or wants to look at 24px (or 2em or 150%), font and site visitors often forget that they can do a quick keyboard shortcut or click on their browser controls to change the size of the font they’re viewing. It also shows that you want to accomodate them; that you recognize your OTF size (one true font) isn’t theirs, and that’s okay. It’s always nice to make your visitors feel as important as they are.

6. My husband and I share a love of the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin by Ronald Huereca. Who hasn’t made a mistake in a comment and wish they could undo it before someone else saw? I know I have. This plugin allows users (and admins) to edit a comment to remove the evidence of foot-in-mouth or inability to choose between they’re/their/there problem the commenter just demonstrated.

7. There’s no list without cforms by Delicious Days. Cforms is a really nice form manager that allows you to create your own questions, add your own styles to the form, and track the responses in a couple of different ways. It’s a little confusing if you’re not familiar with CSS, but they even offer a pretty complete help section. Best thing about this plugin over other form managers is that I’ve never had it crash my site or refuse to run, and it offers a lot of room for my own creativity.

8. Dueced is all over the place (he has some great themes, too), but my favorite of his plugins is Collapsible Elements. Define how you want your elements to display, add a little custom CSS, and you have blocks of text that appear and disappear at a click. It’s especially useful for long FAQ pages or other big blocks of text (I should probably have demonstrated it on this post!).

9. As visual as I am, it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to be using a lightbox plugin of some sort. Frankly, I don’t have a big recommendation. There are new ones and variations of the old ones coming out all the time. I can say that Lightbox2 by Stimuli.ca is the one I use, and I like it because it’s simple, it doesn’t conflict with other plugins, and it does what I want it to do. You can’t ask for much more than that.

10. The Google XML Sitemap Generator by Arne Brachhold is pretty much a must and takes absolutely no time at all to set up. Everyone wants the search engines to find them, right?

Bonus A: Headspace2. This is the plugin my husband talked me into. I haven’t done much with it yet. It allows you to change the name of your post, add tags, and massage your SEO. So far it hasn’t annoyed me, so that’s a win.

Bonus B: Multi-Level Navigation. if you’re a mad lover of pretty glass buttons and smooth drop down menus but don’t know how to make one, this is a nice one for you. It builds a drop down menu for you based on the suckerfish dropdown technique. It takes some tweaking (or did for me) to make it look the way I wanted it to look, but it’s especially nice for a site that I’m not going to be tweaking on a regular basis. Once it’s set up and running, the site owner can change out pages and posts to their hearts’ content and the menu will keep up.

There are a lot of great WordPress plugins. If you want to explore and try them out, I suggest getting them from the WordPress Repository, where comments and ratings from others can help you determine if you want to take the time/go through the bother, and where you can be a little more assured that the cute little widget isn’t doing something you didn’t know about behind your back.

Conventional wisdom consistently lists the following:

Dated gimmicks. Flashing, pixelated GIFs; poor navigation structure (even or especially if it looks “cute”); smiley faces; pictures of puppies and kittens–They’ll make you look like you’re well behind the curve in all of your business dealings, including the one you’re trying to sell (and even if it’s a personal website, you’re selling something–yourself).

Large graphics. This is less of an issue than it used to be as people move more toward high-speed Internet access, but I recommend visiting the local library to try to put yourself in a visitor’s shoes. You’ll have, on average, a half hour. How much of your half hour of library Internet time is eaten up waiting for your website to fully load? Even 5 seconds can be too long for some people.

Poor SEO planning. Flash websites–last I heard–aren’t SEO friendly, though there are ways to improve that, even with Flash sites. Blogs are getting better, but also have trouble managing good SEO. Search Engine Optimization means you’re found when people are looking for what you’re selling. It’s important to be sure that the site is constructed in such a way that the search engines can find it and list it appropriately.

Other things to avoid? I hate the ones above, but the ones following the cut are my top five:

1. Music. Unless you’re a musician, or music is somehow a part of your mission or aesthetic, steer clear of including music on your site. Even if you are a musician or music is somehow a part of your mission or aesthetic, when you include music, either make it opt-in, where you recommend a song and allow the site visitor to turn it on and listen, or make the “OFF” button clearly visible.

According to Websense, a significant portion of the workforce visit websites during working hours (“Men admitted to spending on average 2.3 hours per week on personal-related websites, and women admitted to spending 1.5 hours per week”.) There’s a reason NSFW (not safe for work) is a well-known acronym. You don’t want your site visitors to not only stop visiting, but tell their friends not to visit because your site is NSFW. On top of that, your taste in music is not everyone else’s, and/or they may find it intrusive. Eventually people will stop coming even if they don’t remember why.

2. Frames. Frames went away…and then they came back. Why did they come back? So designers could fit a lot of content in a small space while keeping their pretty borders always in sight. Unfortunately, the scroll bars are obnoxious and the whole thing looks clunky and poorly planned.

3. Mixed signals. Is your company fun, eclectic, happy? Is it reserved, serious, focused on the bottom line? Is it exclusive, classic, artistic? Is your letterhead and logo blue and yellow?

Thinking about these things before your designer starts can save everyone from major headaches. I ask my clients to look at other websites and tell me what they like about them. That cuts through our inability to use the same language. What I think of as RGB color #8CD622 a client may call “pretty green” or even “soft green” or “electric green” or “yellowy green”–I’d call it chartreuse. If my client is consistently drawn to sites that have bright blocks of color, I’m not going to design a site using maroon, gray, and tan. But, if their logo is maroon, gray and tan (and they won’t let me change it for them) or they want their site to come across as sedate and professional, I’m going to steer them away from blocks of #8CD622 on a #FFFFFF (white, or, horrors, #000000 [black]) background.

Every business has a generally appropriate look, and that look needs to function according to their needs. It has to please their customers, “feel right”, and say to site visitors that here is a business or person who is funny, or artistic, or classic, or business-like, or quirky, eclectic… If the site has quirky elements mixed equally with sedate elements, no one knows what to think. The site “feels wrong” and the visitor goes looking for someone who seems to know what their doing, not considering that a site that feels wrong has nothing to do with the competency of the business or the people who run it (unless they’re in the business of website design).

4. Excessively wide or narrow use of space. People need “white space” to rest their eyes. Don’t fill your site with long paragraphs of unbroken text, small fonts, multiple pictures–everything jammed together. However, don’t go the other way and include a narrow, boxed central section that leaves visitors wondering if you’re still using a monitor set at 800×600 resolution. Try to shoot for adequate white space for someone using the average 1024×768, but try to keep it just inside, for those whose resolution is much smaller, and I personally try to make something interesting in the background for those web visitors who have the monster monitors with super high resolution.

Liquid layouts were quite popular for a while as a way to address the issue. If your first website visitor could only see 800×600 but your second could see 1024×760, no problem, the content shifted to fit the width of the window. Unfortunately, as websites have become more complex, designers have found it more and more difficult to make liquid layouts look good–especially using CSS instead of table design, while making the site cross-browser compatible.

5. Poor or “cookie-cutter” layout. It says little about your creative problem solving ability, certainly doesn’t put you in front of the herd, if you have a website that looks like every other insurance broker, artist, author, blogger, actuary, insert your industry here website. For that reason I dislike buying templates on the web that promise to give you a professional look. If it looks like every other professional you’re not much farther ahead.

However, where you put the content is as important as the content itself. It’s important to get a designer with a good idea, or go back and consider design principles for yourself. While you don’t want to be limited by it, thinking about how good paper layout is managed is a very good start. Most websites look like pages to us–it’s why we call them web pages. Putting graphics in to a document willy-nilly looks like bad design, top heavy or simply confused. Forgetting or not including attribution for your quotes, graphs, or photos makes you look like you’re stealing instead of ignorant of the best way to include it. There are, of course, a million bad designs out there, but if you consider the elements of good paper design, you’ll have a start on figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

That’s a lot of what not to includes. What should you include? Elements of your own personality–that’s the best way to be sure the site’s unique–and your expertise–content is still king.

Website Design

Endicott Studios… Beautiful images, beautiful stories…

CSS, Design Inspiration. One of my very favorite websites to visit now and again, especially when I need inspiration, has been the CSS Zen Garden site. Since 2004, designers have been sending in beautiful designs that demonstrate the flexibility of CSS. The content of the site never changes, only the way it looks, from a movie theater to a garden, a sci-fi thriller theme to a daguerreotype. The brain behind CSS Zen Garden, Dave Shea, wrote a book about the beauty of CSS that’s pretty important reading for anyone who wants to design beautiful websites that people can actually use. As of this writing, CSS Zen Garden is down, but I hope it comes back. Dave Shea thinks it’s still relevant and so do I. Based on the comments I read when I Google for news about when Zen Garden might be back, so do many designers–all of them, like me, not quite sure we’re up to that standard yet, not every site every time, but we’re working toward it. And that’s a beautiful thing. Dave Shea’s blog is the absolutely gorgeous mezzoblue. (And thumbnails of the old Zen Garden designs are hidden away here too. Now that I’ve found it, I intend to haunt it until he gives me back my inspiration. If he does.

Blogging, Website Templates. This website is based on the WordPress engine. WordPress is a wonder and I’m completely sold on it. Anyone who wants a beautiful website can make it happen all by themselves. A quick installation (and many hosting companies offer automated set-up so you don’t have to get into the guts of things), and it’s time to go theme shopping. Take a look at the many, many free themes available from smart designers who like to share and choose one (after spending far too many hours going, “That one! No, no, I want that one!”). If you know any CSS and/or basic HTML and/or basic PHP, you’ll find that you can customize it in a lot of different ways very easily. The best part, you don’t HAVE to know those things to post news, your opinion, or pictures of your kids in their halloween costumes. And, if you don’t have your own website, you can put a blog up on the WordPress site for free!

One caveat: Do a little research. Some WordPress themes have code embedded in them that might do things you don’t want your website to do in sneaky ways. I believe the honchos at WordPress have removed any hinky themes from the template site, but it’s not hard to do a quick Google search on the safest, least hacked, best designer, or what have you. Just to be safe. The WordPress Theme Site.

Excellent WordPress Themes. Chris Pearson gives good advice. He calls his blog “The best damn blog on the planet.” He might even be right. He also dishes up perfectly validated WordPress themes, SEO tutorials, and a dozen other bites of tasty Internet pie.

CSS. Whenever I’m stumped about code, I take a gander at A List Apart‘s archives, usually to find that they’ve already solved the problem (often a year or two before I thought of it).

Code. W3Schools are a boon to designers, wanna be designers–anyone who ever wanted to roll up their sleeves and figure out the code–or crazy people like me who, once upon a time said, “I could do that!” They provide a great resource for code snippets, loads of tutorials, and even a little sandbox where you can tinker with code and immediately see what your tinkering broke. Changed. I meant changed.

CSS, Code. Alsacreations is a nifty website that provides cool tutorials for website building. I like them as much for the lovely citrus header as for their easy to understand lessons.

CSS, Code. Listamatic is the CSS Zen Garden for navigation. Designers from all over the world have donated their take on simple list navigation, both horizontal and vertical. Listamatic and its siblings are provided by Russ Weakley of Max Design.

Standards and Practices. No talk of design is complete without mentioning the Web Standards Group. Like art, web design is best when it works within the limits of its form and transcends them using the right tools. The Web Standards Group “promotes web standards and best practices,” a good resource if you don’t want to be left behind.

Publishing

E-Books. A post about inspiration would be incomplete without listing the teleread site. Teleread lets me know what’s going on in the world of e-books. Since I consider them pretty important, it’s a good thing to skim. The contributors are prolific (most of them, I’m one, but not so much with the prolific), so skimming is all I can do some days, but if I want to know the latest news about Amazon’s Kindle, the IADP, or how not to brick a Sony, that’s where I go. How is that inspirational? It’s always good to know what the limits are before I get in over my head.

E-Books. I also head over to MobileRead. MobileRead’s forums provide a lot of great chatter about e-books, their books section provides some great reading, and they often have the latest e-book news before anyone else.

Print Books. PersonaNonData keeps me up to date with the world of publishing, often inciting me to more “I could do that!” than is currently wise.

Creativity

Endicott Studios gives me candy. My kind, anyway. Beautiful images, beautiful stories, and information about more stories, more images, and all things mythic. It’s probably the one site I would be lost without.

And talking about stories, we must, of course, talk about With Intent to Commit Horror, my very own Undead Rat’s website. He’s been compiling the information about horror authors, horror books, and horrid websites listed on that website for years (thank everything you believe in that you don’t have to listen to him talk in his sleep) and it just keeps on growing. The blog provides links to great content on other sites and the book lists provide information on what you really really don’t want to be reading in bed just before lights out… unless you’re just like him. Then all bets are off.

There are far too many really wonderful websites to list, but I leave you with one last one. Mine. My other one, that is. Drollerie Press publishes amazing fiction in every genre in both print and electronic formats. Our first print book will be pre-released on the site this month. Still Life with Devils, by the incomparable mystery author Deborah Grabien, (author of 12 novels, not including the upcoming Kinkaid Series) is a freaky supernatural thriller that is seriously hard to put down (don’t believe me? Ask Publisher’s Weekly; they suggest a sequel!). We also have a couple of e-novels coming this month, Alien Dreams from John B. Rosenman and Pixie Warrior from Rachael de Vienne. We’ll have more print and electronic works, both full length and short stories, coming soon.

Take a look at the resources page for great free fiction reading, and if you’re into both good and free, check out the stories from our authors.

Got a great site about design, art, books, or anything else? Drop a comment. I’d love to go check it out.

I don’t think there’s anything sexist about presenting an attractive example of the buying demographic on your website.

Well, no. I don’t want anyone to sound like a jerk, but the images you choose for your website should not only be indicative of the content, they should also be attractive. Pretty, smiling girls are right up there with babies, kittens and puppies for appeal factor for both sexes.

Unfortunately, babies, kittens and puppies had nothing to do with his business, while pretty, smiling girls actually did. His potential clients are predominately women between the ages of 25 and 50. His contention was that a man on the website represented him doing business with them. My contention was that the pretty girls were representative of his potential client. I don’t think there’s anything sexist about presenting an attractive example of your buying demographic on your website.

So what’s the answer? Mine is to make the link more obvious. That way you don’t have to tell the potential client to click on the link under the pretty girl, you tell the potential client to click on the big button that says FREE SAMPLE.

Meanwhile, casual visitors to your site see pretty, smiling girls, and young up and coming professionals regardless of gender, and a few other relevant pictures all illustrating your stellar, chock-full of content, really useful text.

What’s your answer?

1. You can’t stop someone from linking to your website (thus it’s quite possible that link farms or other “low quality” websites will link to your site and in turn lower your rankings).

2. If you want to be truly useful to your readers you’re going to be linking to other sites, either to provide your readers with more information or to give them a different point of view on the subject.

I’m going to use Drollerie Press as an example (www.drolleriepress.com). The press provides links to author websites and to author and reader resources. It has incoming links from reviewers, readers, others in the industry, and its authors.

In order to take full advantage of the understanding that it needs more quality incoming links than outgoing to be considered successful, it could pull the resource page. Unfortunately, to do so would be antithetical to the Drollerie Press business model, which, boiled down, says they have pie (media that is attractive to a certain type of consumer) but that others have pie as well, and honestly pointing that out, and who else might give good pie is just good business.

In addition, those quality incoming links need to be a range of long-standing and fresh to maintain ranking, but that can be managed over time by regularly providing fresh, interesting content that people will want to share with others.

So, what’s the bottom line as far as I’m concerned? Not to worry too much about linking. Don’t link willy-nilly to anyone who asks, but keep focused on good business practices. Offer good products and fresh, reliable, relevant content, then link to others who also provide useful content. As long as you’re taking care of business, this portion of SEO will most likely take care of itself.