Essential Plugins and Themes for Creating a WordPress Website That Isn’t a Blog

It might seem strange to use WordPress to create a traditional type of website, one which has a fixed home page and doesn’t include a blog. However, if you are already familiar with WordPress, or you want to make use of the countless themes and plugins available for the software when creating a traditional non-blog website, we totally understand why you would want to use WordPress for this purpose.

Being able to tap into the shared knowledge of the large community of WordPress users and its burgeoning ecosystem is another benefit of using this software that can’t be overlooked.

So in today’s post we are going to look at some useful plugins and themes you can install on your brochureware or non-blog website, which will make it easier to manage, add some essential features, and generally look and work better. Continue

Customizing the WordPress Admin Area to Make It Your Own

There are a number of reasons why you might want to customize the admin area of a WordPress website. One of those reasons could be to make the dashboard area easier to use from your perspective as a site administrator. The other reason could be to improve the user experience for your co-authors or clients.

While the admin interface looks fairly clean and manageable on a fresh installation of WordPress, it doesn’t take long for the sidebar menu and toolbar navigation systems to start getting cluttered. This can not only make it difficult to find the items and pages you are looking for, but it can easily overwhelm new users who are just logging into the back end of a WordPress website for the first time. Continue

Its Time to Take Another Look at Jetpack

At the recent Pressnomics event, WordPress creator and Automattic head honcho Matt Mullenweg suggested that the Jetpack plugin, from WordPress.com, was partly responsible for the success of the WordPress software to date.

Matt has also mentioned that Jetpack and its social and mobile-friendly modules would be a key player in helping WordPress move from its current market share of 23% of all websites, up to the 50% mark and beyond. Continue

How to Publish Professional Looking Review Posts on Your WordPress Website

Whether you are publishing reviews of products and services you’ve used, or promoting your own offerings for purchase online, an effective way to present that content is to use a dedicated review post template. This helps your reviews to really stand out from the competition and catch the eye of your visitors.

Thankfully as a WordPress user you are in luck as there a number of high quality free and premium review plugins for WordPress that make it very easy to convert your regular blog posts into feature rich review posts.

In this article we will take a look at the best options for publishing professional looking reviews on your WordPress website, without the need to switch themes or alter your existing template. Continue