10. WP FollowME Twitter Plugin

WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog. It’s a beautifully elegant way to add a Twitter badge to your site. You can customize virtually everything about the badge – the colors, the font, and even the Twitter icon. This is a very simple plugin and that is the beauty of it. It’s the best Twitter badge and gets the most click throughs from any Twitter badge we’ve found.

Visit WP FollowMe Twitter Plugin

9. Wickett Twitter Widget

To help build up a following on Twitter, one thing you want to do is broadcast your tweets in as many ways as possible. The Wickett Twitter Widget is an awesomely simple way to get your most recent tweets on your WordPress site. It installs as a sidebar widget and you can specify the number of tweets to display and whether or not you want to hide “reply” tweets. There are several other Twitter related plugins, but this one makes the top ten list because of it simplicity and elegance. You go to alot of trouble to find interesting links and comments and so it is great to be able to share your tweets on your blog.

Visit Wickett Twitter Widget

8. WP Logic

Perhaps a tad technical, but well worth mentioning, the WP Logic plugin gives every widget an extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on. Suppose you have a WordPress site that acts as both your main website as well as your blog and you only want to show your blog categories on your “posts” and not on your “pages” – it’s easy to do with this plugin. This is one of those plugins where your friends will be saying, “Wow! How did you do that?”

Visit Widget Logic

7. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

Visit PageMash simple WordPress page order management.

6. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

Visit All in One SEO Pack

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to./p>

Visit Google XML Sitemaps Generator

4. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techie, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “I just Dugg your site.”

Visit WP Super Cache to make WordPress faster

3. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function. There are also plenty of add-ons as well including the NextGEN FlashViewer and NextGEN ImageFlow.

Visit NextGEN Image Gallery

2. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

Visit cformsII WordPress Form Plugin

1. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

Visit Gravity Forms

There are other solutions available such as Olark which offers a free plan including 20 conversations per month or SightMax which offers a one operator system for $299. But, for most of our clients, including ourselves, the best and easiest solution for adding a Live Chat component to a website is to use integrate Google’s Chatback Badge. Best of all, Google’s Chatback Badge is free! If you are using WordPress there is a plugin to help you add a Google Chatback widget (Google Talk Widget) to your sidebar.

Adding Live Chat To Your Site For Free

To get started, you are going to need a Google account. If you already have a Gmail email address then you are set. Once you have your Google account, here is how to add Live Chat to your website for free.

1) Download the Google Talk Widget for free from the library of WordPress plugins.

2) Go over to Google’s Chatback Badge page and get the iFrame code for your badge. When you are there, you can configure your badge to your liking by selecting the title, style, and your nickname (screen name) for the badge. For the nickname, you can choose anything you want, so you do not have to reveal your Gmail username or your own real name. For example, you could use the nickname “support” or “live help” for your badge.

3) Navigate to the Appearance –> Widgets page in your WordPress admin panel and drag and drop the Google Talk widget onto your side bar. Give the widget a title, perahaps something like Live Chat and paste in the iFrame code that you copied from Google’s Chatback Badge page. Then click the “Save” button and you are finished!

PHPoet Tip: We also use the Widget Logic plugin to be able to control which widgets appear on the various pages of your WordPress website. For example, perhaps you only want your Live Chat link to appear on your “web pages” and not your “blog posts” – you can control that using the Widget Logic plugin.

Now, when a potential customer is on your site, they will be able to chat with you. When they click your Live Chat link, a new, little chat window will open and they can initiate a live chat session with you. You don’t have to buy any software to monitor the live chat. You just use the Instant Messaging client you already have. This will work with any IM client that supports Google Talk – we use Adium.

Using Google’s Chatback Badge is not limited to WordPress,  if you are not using WordPress you can still use the Chatback Badge. All you have to do is drop the iFrame code on any webpage of your site. Please feel free to contact us if you need help  installing Live Chat on your website. Whether you use WordPress or not, we are happy to help.

7 Additional Benefits of Live Chat

In addition to helping your customers get answers to their questions, there are several other benefits for using Live Chat on your WordPress store, or any e-commerce website. Here are some tips and ideas for additional ways you can benefit from using Live Chat on your website.

• Having Live Chat available improves customer satisfaction by 90% while shopping  according to an internet e-commerce study.
• Increase the trust your visitors have in you and your company. If people can get in touch with you easily they will feel more comfortable shopping on your website.
• Use the feedback to further optimize your website. If a bunch of people are all asking the same question, create an FAQ page that answers the question.
• Faster and more accurate than phone support. It is much easier to share FedEx tracking numbers and links to web pages via chat than it is to try say it over the phone.
• Use the live chat sessions to get ideas for other products or services you may want to offer.
• Take the questions from the chat sessions and use them for blog post or newsletter ideas.
• Decrease product return rates. Well informed customers are much less likely to return a product. Handling product returns is expensive and you can dramatically reduce this cost by making sure your customers make informed decisions before they buy.

Forgetting the WordPress Head Function

The wp_head hook is perhaps the most important theme hook that a huge number of plugins use to include the necessary code enabling them to run on your web site. If you forget to include in your themes header you can expect to a bunch of plugins to break. So, if you happen to notice some bizarre problems with plugins that have worked for you before, double check to make sure the theme you are using has a call to somewhere in the section of your theme’s code.

One of the things that the wp_head() function does is include javascript scripts that have be queued up using the wp_enqueue_script() function (more on this function later). So, if your theme has some in-line javascript that uses jQuery, for example, make sure the function call appears before you start writing jQuery code. Otherwise, your jQuery code will start throwing errors such as “jQuery is undefined” or something similar.

Forgetting the WordPress Footer Function

Like the wp_head() function call, the wp_footer() function call is also heavily used by plugins like the Google Analytics plugin, the Get Clicky Analytics plugin and many other plugins that need to include code at the bottom of your web page. So be sure to include a call to in your theme’s footer.php file. A good place to put it is just before the closing tag.

Hard-Coding The Link To jQuery

As mentioned in the comments about missing wp_head() function calls, the wp_enqueue_script() function call provides a safe and efficient way to include javascript resources in your theme. Several plugins and even certain aspects of your theme may require the use of jQuery or some other javascript library. If they all hard code links to your jQuery library you end up including the library multiple times and all kinds of vexing errors pop up. If you always make a habit to include javascript libraries using the wp_enqueue_script() function, then WordPress takes care to make sure that it only includes the specified library one time, even if there are multiple calls to wp_enqueue_script() in the plugins and the theme you are using.

Also, you might not know that WordPress includes a copy of some of the many popular javascript libraries including scriptaculous, thickbox, jquery, tinymce, and prototype. Take a look for yourself, they are in the wp-includes/js folder of your WordPress installation. So if you want to use jQuery, for example, all you have to do is this:

And WordPress will include the jQuery library for you. Just remember to include a call to wp_head() in your theme’s header.

Forgetting The Image Styles

When developing a theme it’s easy to forget to include all of the css that the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor uses for positioning images that you insert into your posts or pages. So, be sure to put the following css into your style.css file to make sure your you can align your images using the visual editor.

  img.alignright {float:right; margin:10px 0 1em 1em}
  img.alignleft {float:left; margin:10px 1em 1em 0}
  img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}
  a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
  a img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
  a img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

File Permissions Preventing WordPress From Updating

File permissions may be a little bit technical and, depending on your web host, there might not be anything you can do about it. Nevertheless, it’s still worth mentioning because with the right file permissions you can make life much easier by enabling WordPress to automatically upgrade your plugins and even your WordPress installation itself with just a couple clicks. The best scenario is when all the files in your web site are “owned” by the same user that WordPress (your webserver) is running as. This means that WordPress can write to all of your files and directories enabling it to update your plugins and such without requiring you to enter any FTP information. We have our servers set up to work this way as we find it’s by far the easiest for our clients.

Some web hosts, however, are not set up this way. So, as a bare minimum, you need to make sure that WordPress can write to the wp-content/uploads directory so that you can upload media to your server through the Media Manager within WordPress. This lets you add images to your webserver and then insert those images into your posts and pages.

If you have any other tips or think we left out some important points, please leave your comments below. Likewise, if you ever need help with your WordPress system please feel free to contact us.