Designing flyers, leaflets, postcards and business cards can be a risky business – a single typo, missed by the designer and the client signing it off goes to print, suddenly you have 10,000 business cards that are completely unusable – they have to be reprinted with the cost that comes along with it. Even worse – the client could of started to give out the Business Cards to their customers – who could of spotted the typo, and as a result their first impression may not be positive.

Now, online – a website is designed, built and uploaded to the world wide web. A typo is spotted after being published – within a couple of minutes it can be amended, saved and republished with little cost and hardly any time taken. Now, some initial visitors may have seen the initial typo, but since the update all visitors will see the correct spelling and those early visitors who come back to the website will see the amended version.

On my way to work I drive past a house, the owner currently has their car for sale – I’m not 100% sure what the car is because the only you get is that there is a sandwich board outside with 3 words chalked on;

“Car for Sale”

Now, I can’t imagine anybody driving past being enticed by this sign to find out more – the sign is making the assumption that someone is looking for a car, and the current owner has a possible answer for them. You can’t actually see what the car is – it’s parked down the driveway, partially hidden from sight.

In the offline world, and in this case specifically – facts are required. Car for sale could of been the title that lead into a bullet point list of facts and figures – what is the car, how many miles has it done, how old is it, what features does it have, and how much is it being sold for.

Now, online – as an initial statement, as a domain name – carforsale would be brilliant. Google – the most popular search engine with approximately an 80% market share uses the domain name as one of the most important matches to a user’s keyword search. Although, funnily enough – a Google UK search for “car for sale” does not bring up the carforsale.co.uk website – but this is probably because it’s not a website, just a holding page and has as much detail as the sandwich board!

I’ve been working with Wordpress more and more recently and have just launched one site built in this versatile content management system (wormsigntshirts.co.uk) with another on the way very soon.

When installing Wordpress I download and install a set of plugins that help extend Wordpresses capabilities and give me features that aren’t ‘out of the box’. Here’s my list of 9 essential plugins for Wordpress – the ones I use each and every time.

All In One SEO Pack
Add tags and descriptions to posts and pages to help with search engine optimisation.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack

Contact Form 7
A simple contact form, add any elements you want and give them a class so you can style them in a style sheet.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7

Really Simple CAPTCHA
Can be used in conjunction with the above contact form to add a little spam guard security,
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/really-simple-captcha

Feedstats
Statistics for your blog and RSS feed.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedstats-de

WP-DB-Backup
Make backups of your database tables and content, then email them to yourself – just encase the worse case scenario should happen to your blog or website.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup

Google XML Sitemaps
Another helpful SEO plugin that will automatically crawl your and compile a XML sitemap that can be tracked and submitted to Google, Ask, Yahoo and MSN.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator

Google Analytics for Wordpress
Track visitors on your website with this powerful analytics package – this Wordpress plugin makes installing the code within your website very simple.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Downloads and installs the latest version of Wordpress, very clever and very simple – it will also make backups along the way so there’s no chance of you loosing your content.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade

Sociable
Allow your visitors to submit your pages and blog posts to one of hundreds of social bookmark sharing websites – you can select the ones that you want on your website.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable

If you have any essential plugins that you use – suggest them in the comments box.

I recently purchased a Wordpress Theme that had a CSS style sheet that wasn’t arranged in a format that I’m used to – which made it a bit trickier to work with.

So I used Clean CSS which tidied up the CSS and rearranged it into a format that I’m used to, making it a lot easier to work with and edit. It only takes a couple of minutes to work through the code, you can either paste in your code or point the site to a file.

Have a go and find out more here; www.cleancss.com