I build a lot of WordPress sites and these are, in my opinion, the must-have WordPress plugins for 2011.  I start almost every new WordPress install with these plugins, even if I don’t have a specific intention for them all at the time of development.  If for no other reason, these WordPress plugins will make your websites function at a top-notch level in 2011.

Jetpack WordPress plugin for 2011

Jetpack is a compilation of handy features for any WordPress installation.  It includes Gravatar Hovercards, WordPress stats (available as a standalone plugin), Twitter Widget, wp.me shortlinks, Sharedaddy social sharing plugin, and Shortcode Embeds.

Usernoise Contact Form WordPress plugin for 2011

Usernoise is an absolute must.  It is the easiest, smallest and best-looking contact form plugin available for WordPress.  It is super-simple to setup, but that means there’s not a lot of customization options.  Usernoise Plugin ads a floating “feedback” image on the side of your site, that when clicked, created a slick AJAX powered overlay contact form.

Donation Can WordPress plugin for 2011

Donation Can creates a widget that accepts both set and custom donations via Paypal.  It works magically, letting you choose fundraising goals like “Pay for our server costs” or whatever you’d like.  Set weekly, monthly goals, anything really.  Perfect for kickstarting your WordPress website development.

Password Protect WordPress Plugin for 2011

Password Protect plugin is essential for development, especially if you’ve got a great idea that you don’t want stolen.  Make sure your WordPress install is not indexable by search engines, then install this plugin.  It will only show the front end to logged in users, ie: you.  You can even set a custom message to users who try and view your site.

Facebook Traffic Pop WordPress Plugin

This plugin creates a floating Facebook like box that utilizes jQuery overlay to catch visitors for a set period of time.  They can either “like” you or wait for it to fade away.  This is a great, albeit pushy technique to increase your social networking presence.

Foobar Announcement Bar WordPress Plugin for 2011

This plugin expertly mimics the HelloBar which is a free but branded dropdown bar at the top of your page.  HelloBar limits what you can place in their bar, and asks for $25/monthly to unlock the best features.  That’s pretty steep, especially when this plugin only costs $9 once at CodeCanyon.

Google +1 WordPress Plugin for 2011

Despite how you feel about Google’s foray into social networking, savvy webmasters will need to adopt Google +1 as the next wave of content sharing.  This plugin is free, in the WordPress plugin directory and gives you tons of flexibility to choose how the button is displayed next to your content.

How much do you stand to lose if your site goes down and you’re left without a backup? Even if you only have a smaller personal site, losing months or even years worth of work will hurt.

If your site is vital to your business it can get you in the pocketbook, too. You’ll not only have to worry about lost content, but links that now return 404 errors, any customizations you did to your theme and plugins, lost comments and all of the other tweaks and modifications you’ve made to your site.

You can rebuild but why go through all of that hassle when it can be avoided by having a good backup strategy.

A good backup strategy requires a balance between being as up to date as possible with the effort you can reasonably put into it with the resources at your disposal. Remember, you can’t rely on your web host to do it for you. Even if they offer the service, if you are locked out of your hosting account their backup will do you no good. Ask yourself these questions before formulating your backup plan:

How often do I really need to make a backup?

This will vary based on how often content is updated and how often changes are made to the structure of the site itself. A busy site that’s updated several times a day and receives a substantial number of comments might be backed up hourly while other sites can get away with just once a week.

For most sites a daily backup of the database is sufficient; an hourly backup could potentially strain the server, particularly at busy times of the day.

The WordPress files such as content, themes and plugins will also need to be backed up on a regular basis. If you rarely make changes to your theme or plugins and don’t upload amount of media, this can be done less often, perhaps once a week or even less often if you aren’t making changes and uploading images or other media.

No matter how often you choose to backup your database and files, you’ll want to be sure to do a backup right before making any changes to your site as insurance in case something goes wrong and once again after all changes have been made.

Where will I store my backup?

The simplest solution is to store your backup to your local machine, though this isn’t without its own set of problems. If you’re away from your computer and your site goes down, how will you get it back up and running without access to the backup?

Although it doesn’t seem likely that something will happen to your computer at the same time your site goes down, it is possible.

You can also store backups on your server. However, if you can’t access your sever, you’re still screwed. I’ve heard of more than one person who had their site shut down by their web host and were then unable to get the files and databases needed to migrate to another site.

It’s always best to store copies of your backups in more than one location, for example your personal computer and an online storage service such as dropbox. You can also look into paying a service to make and store backups for you as an added convenience and for peace of mind.

So I have these backups, now what?

Having backups scheduled every ten minutes won’t do you any good if you’ve no idea what to do with them in the event that your site goes POOF!

If you don’t have a plan in place to restore your site, you can lose hours and even days trying to figure out how to get your site back up and running. For most people, this will be stress they don’t need and time they can’t afford to spend. Take the time now to prepare for the worst case scenario.

If you have the time and inclination, teach yourself how to restore your site from the backups. There is a bit of technical know-how needed, but it’s something most people can be taught to do. Since restoring your site isn’t something you’ll do on a regular basis, make sure to write down step-by-step instructions and keep them and all relevant log ins and passwords in a safe place that will be easy for you to access if you need to fix your site yourself.

You don’t want to waste time having to Google and remembering FTP details while under pressure.

Another possibility is to develop a relationship with somebody who is experienced with WordPress and can fix your site more efficiently than you could. Again, it’s best to contract with this person in advance and find out how much the service will cost and what information they’ll need from you to do it. You don’t want to find out at the last minute that you can’t afford to have somebody fix your site.

Some freelancers will allow you to pay a retainer to have their services for a fixed amount of time per month or year. Even if you never need their services, think of it as insurance!

Finally, you can contract with a service that will make and store backups for you and will restore your site should the need ever arise. These services vary in price depending on size of the site and the services offered but can be very affordable, especially if you have a number of sites that need to be maintained.

If you schedule backup with a professional service, be sure to ask them how often backups are made, where the backups will be stored and if you’ll get a copy and how long will you have to wait to get somebody to restore your site if needed.

As the saying goes, stuff does happen. But even though we can’t always control hardware failure or malicious attacks, we can be proactive and make a plan to ensure that even in the worst case scenario we have a backup of our sites and can get them up and running again in the least amount of time possible.

Keeping your online assets safe with a regularly scheduled backup routine, is the best insurance a site owner can have.

Sean Platt is a content marketing specialist who offers regularly scheduled WordPress backups at TheWPMechanic.Com. Follow him on Twitter.



Want to see what our readers are interested in?  We ask readers to submit their favorite, new content and resources so we can share them with you.  Without further delay, here are some of the best recent submissions for your enjoyment.

50 Striking Typography Tutorials Using Photoshop

In the broadest sense, typography is the design and use of typefaces as a means of visual communication from calligraphy to the ever-developing use of digital type. we creating list of striking techniques of typography tutorials using Photoshop. Typography is sometimes seen as encompassing many separate fields from the type designer who creates letterforms to the graphic designer who selects typefaces and arranges them on the page. We hope you all like these stunning typography graphics and also can share your own typefaces.

50 Stunning Poster Advertisement Ideas

Poster designing is one of the most creative part of graphic designing and helping for brand advertisements, now web designers also like to draw advertisement posters for web promotions and we have some awesome collection of Poster designs in this creative post. Creative Posters always attract users whether they graphical posters accumulate to the side of roads, in the paper flayers, wall posters, telephone cabin and even when distribute on the way, they always grab the viewers attention and invite them to take some immediate action. This is my favorite alternatives for inspiration is poster design, by looking at great posters, you can learn a lot about composition, typography, and use of colors…

40 Stunning Tutorials about 3D Text

Adobe Photoshop is powerful tool for create any kind of professional designs and effects for both categories like Print Media and Web Designs, we’re proudly present beautiful listing 3D Text Effect Tutorials Using Photoshop, We have collected 40 best ever cool 3D typography text effect trainings. you’ll find all these beautiful, high-quality Adobe Photoshop tutorials from top tutorial sites and designers, they did excellent work in all trainings and sharing helping techniques about Photoshop.

50 Ultimate Useful Free MAC Applications

Apple always produces most powerful products, one of those are Mac Machines and we presenting “50 Ultimate Useful Free MAC Applications” we dug up from famous resources all over the web and arrange on our platform for you Mac lovers. Each of listed are free to download and use as you required in your field, one of the greatest things about Mac Computers are wealth of extremely talented developers that are willing to share their amazing creations without asking for a single cent, because everyone loves to get free Applications.The following list may come in handy too. In this weekend, we’d like to showcase you a list of really useful yet free Mac Software’s you can install for your Mac, we create our list in 3 category: Free MAC Applications for Freelancers, Music and Video MAC Applications, Free MAC Productivity Applications, File Sharing and Transfer Applications and MAC Apps for Web Designers.

30+ Useful Jquery Tutorials Using Advance Techniques

Although there are many great techniques already but hopefully these listed jquery tutorials will help you too and it will also give you a more professional feel and you will get latest techniques for modern design requirements of Web Developers.In this our first jQuery Tutorials article, we will presenting some really useful trainings about how to learn jquery techniques step by step and also will productive in your websites developments.Hope you will like these listed tutorials and leave your comments.

20 Articles and Tutorials About Using Negative Space

Negative space, also referred to as ‘whitespace’ in design, can dramatically improve your designs and help them breathe more and have a much better flow. Today we have collected 20 articles and tutorials to get you started understanding negative space and effectively applying those principles in your designs.Whether you’re a graphic designer or you design solely for the web, I am certain you will learn quite a lot from those articles. Some of them are geared more towards web-design but some also refer to drawing and painting or simply talk about how to effective use whitespace to craft more interesting designs.

Here is a quick sample of the best and most successful articles from Pingable in 2007.

In terms of page hits:

5 Simple CSS tricks (20,173) It’s very embarrassing to think that this article has got so many hits. It was just a quick list put together with some useful CSS tricks I found around the net and in magazines. Almost all of the traffic came from StumbleUpon. I take encouragement from the fact the 20,173 page hits came from 12,000 unique visitors, so people must have found this article useful enough to come back and actually try out some of the tricks.

10 Purely evil ways to make quick money online (10,142) This article ranks number 3 in Google for the term “Make Quick Money” so it is a constant stream of visitors. If the comments left on StumbleUpon are anything to go by, it pissed a few people off too. I really enjoyed writing it, although I haven’t had all that much success with any of the methods.

The top 15 web API’s for your site (6,620) This article was voted to the homepage of Dzone, and del.icio.us, where it has been saved by 332 people. Social media success is good fun.

In terms of best writing:

What Makes You A Niche Expert?

Is User Generated Content Evil?

Is Your Web Design CRAP?

All three of these articles were a real pleasure to write, although they may not have been as successful as other articles in terms of page views, I feel they represent the best quality of writing on Pingable.

Most comments:

How To Make Your WordPress Blog Safer (29) – Mainly because it was entered into a contest. Getting more comments and interaction with readers is something I really struggle with. This is something I hope to improve on in 2008.

Thanks to all those people who have read my blog this year. I hope I can continue to create good stuff for you to read next year. Cheers, and a very happy new year to everyone.

I want to start my own niche blog site. It will be about toast. I am an expert when it comes to toast. I know the best ways to cook it. I know the best toppings to put on it. I know all the different types of toast, and I am the person to see when it comes to picking a new toaster.

My niche site will have no problems gaining interest because just about everybody eats toast, so I will have a huge market. Toast is fortifying too; I have toast most days in the morning when I check my emails and RSS subscriptions. I will have no issues getting advertising for my site, on account of my astounding expertise in the field of toast. All the bread companies will be dying to get advertisements in front of my highly targeted readership. If I want free lance work, I will make good money, because I am an expert in my field, and the value I bring to others will be priceless.

I will coin new terms like “Optimal Toast Heat Window” (OTHW)- which is the period after the toast has popped, in which you must spread the butter if you want it to melt. I am from New Zealand, where most good butter is made, so I will also have opportunities to sell my services to massive multi-million dollar companies like Fonterra, because of my obvious influence within the Toast Niche.

The opportunities are endless. It will be hard work though. I will have to produce a blog article most days. I will have to network religiously with my fellow Toast Niche friends. However, I have no doubt that users on popular social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon will instantly appreciate my work, and vote me to the front page whenever I write an article. Maybe not, maybe I am not an expert after all.

So What Makes Someone a Niche Expert?

Because they say they are? I don’t think so, if that was true then the Blogosphere would be one of the world’s most valuable resources with the amount of “Make Money Online” bloggers.

Because they have a niche site that has a lot of traffic and regular subscribers? Maybe.

Because they were an expert in their niche before they started blogging? Probably.

But what if you aren’t an expert already? Does that mean you can’t be a successful niche blogger? No, but you can strive to be one. Now if only I could find a solid untapped niche to blog about…toast, that’s right!

The idea of creating content to target social media is nothing new. Terms like “Made for Digg” have been coined, and many people have created a basis for a successful site by focusing on attracting social media. When discussing the term Social Media Optimization (SMO) I consider it to be the optimizing of content on your site, this doesn’t cover your actions in social media environments away from your site, which are also important. Take a look at some existing information on this topic:

Rohit Bhargava’s 5 rules for social media optimization:
1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

   Web Strategist adds:

6. Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users

   Cameron Olthuis adds:

8. Know how to target your audience

   What I would like to add:

9. Make your content attractive in appearance – people are shallow, especially when browsing social media, if it looks rubbish, it has much less chance of getting read.
10. Make sure your site is optimized for a fast loading time – if it takes too long to load, people won’t bother. If your site is poorly optimized, large spurts of traffic will crash it.
11. In your face ads, placed where your content should be will hurt your success. It will help your earnings placing ads in key spots, but social media visitors will hate it, and none of them are going to click ads anyway.

Is it really worth it?

Visitors from social media have a short attention span. They drop in, look at what they came to see, if it is attractive they scan over it, if something catches their eye, they may even read it. They will hardly ever click on other content on your site, they won’t click your ads, and very few will subscribe to your feed. So why bother?

Good content for social media is good content for anyone. If you can catch the attention of visitors that are sent your way from social media sites, you can catch the attention of anyone.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ also discusses the value of Social media traffic for gaining incoming links, a very important SEO factor for increasing overall traffic of your site.

This is the main reason why you see so many top 10 type  list posts and other viral content when browsing social media. These types of posts tend to attract people to link to them (linkbait). This should be a key goal in your aim for success on social media sites.

_{Images used in this article are copyrighted by their original websites.}

1. CSS Image Replacement

   System fonts can look ugly, and appear rigid. Using CSS you can replace text with a beautifully formed anti aliased image, yet still have all the accessibility and SEO benefits of text headings.

   Inline:

   <h1>Hello World</h1>

   CSS:

   h1 {
   display:block;
   width:100px;
   height:0;
   padding:30px 0 0 0;
   background-image:url(“heading.gif”);
   overflow:hidden;
   }

   

   The first image is a system font in the browser, see the edges of the “S” are rigid. The second is the same font as an image, the third is a non system font with a shadow, because you can use any font and apply effects to them when using Image Replacement.

2. Rounded Corners Without Using Images

   To create CSS objects that have rounded edges without using images you can use the following technique:

   Inline:

   <div id=”container”>
   <b class=”rtop”>
   <b class=”r1″></b> <b class=”r2″></b> <b class=”r3″></b> <b class=”r4″></b>
   </b>
   <!–content goes here –>
   <b class=”rbottom”>
   <b class=”r4″></b> <b class=”r3″></b> <b class=”r2″></b> <b class=”r1″></b>
   </b>
   </div>

   CSS:

   .rtop, .rbottom {
   display:block
   }
   .rtop *, .rbottom * {
   display: block; height: 1px; overflow: hidden
   }
   .r1 {
   margin: 0 5px
   }
   .r2 {
   margin: 0 3px
   }
   .r3 {margin: 0 2px
   }
   .r4 {margin: 0 1px; height: 2px
   }

3. RSS Feed Icon Without Using an Image

   With the increasing importance of RSS, finding crafty ways to display an icon is a useful skill. This method displays a tidy RSS icon without using an image.

   Inline:

   <a href=”http://pingable.org/feed/” class=”feed”>FEED</a>

   CSS:

   .feed { border:1px solid;
   border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
   padding:0 3px;
   font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
   color:#FFF;
   background:#F60;
   text-decoration:none;
   margin:4px;
   }

4. Size Fonts Without Using Pixel Units

   It is important to size text using a method that is not absolute, so it can be enlarged for better visibility in a browser.

   CSS:

   body {
   font-size: 80%
   }

   p {
   font-size: 1.1em;
   line-height: 1.2em;
   }

5. Using Images For Bullets

   An easy method to create list with images as your bullet points:

   Inline:

   <div id=”navcontainer”>
   <ul id=”navlist”>
   <li id=”active”><a href=”#” id=”current”>Item one</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>Item two</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>Item three</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>Item four</a></li>
   <li><a href=”#”>Item five</a></li>
   </ul>
   </div>

   CSS:

   #navlist {
   list-style-image: url(images/arrow.gif);

   

Assuming that only English speaking readers will be interested in your content is a mistake. Until recently I never considered the possibility that non English speakers could be an audience for this blog. So how do you go about making your content more accessible to those who speak other languages?

Internet language use statistics

• Languages # | Users | % of Internet
• English | 235 m | 38.3 %
• Chinese | 69 m | 11.2 %
• Japanese | 61.4 m | 10 %
• German | 42 m  | 6.8 %
• Spanish | 32.7 m | 5.5 %
• Korean | 25.2 m | 4.1 %
• Italian | 24 m | 3.9 %
• French | 22 m | 3.5 %
• Portuguese | 19 m | 3.1 %
• Russian | 18.1 m | 3 %
• Dutch | 12.4 m | 2 %
• Polish | 6.7 m | 1.1 %
• Swedish | 6 m | 1 %
• Arabic | 5.7 m | 1 %

Source: Translate To Success

English is the most common language spoken on the Internet, but it is still only 38% of the total users on the Internet.

Update Services

Adding an update service to your blog that sends content to foreign language search engines and directories is the key. Update services communicate to other web sites that you have updated the content on your site. I have always looked for ways to optimize this process. At one stage I added a list of 50 or so different sites for WordPress to ping whenever I posted. This of course slows down posting and didn’t seem to work particularly well. So I went back to using Pingomatic, which is the default service for WordPress. This works great as you only have to ping Pingomatic and they do all the hard work of pinging other sites (Google, Technorati etc) to notify them that you have new content. However, Pingomatic is an English only service. Pingoat is a update service that also pings foreign language services. You really don’t have anything to lose by adding Pingoat to the update services for your blog, but to convince you of how useful it can be… the article I posted just yesterday has already been commented on in French , translated and re-posted in Japanese and Italian.

How to add Pingoat Update Service to WordPress

In the dashboard of WordPress go to “Options/ Writing” and paste the following address into the update services, I have also left Pingomatic there.

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

1. Content that’s not written for the web i.e., non-scannable text.
2. Page titles with low search engine visibility, think key words in a combination that entices.
3. Content that looks like an advertisement or content that is an advertisement, I don’t care which books on Amazon you enjoy, they wouldn’t be listed on your site if you weren’t making affiliate money from them.
4. In-your-face advertising i.e., blocks of AdSense that push your real content below the fold/scroll.
5. Violating design conventions – see CRAP Design.
6. Opening new browser windows. Let the users decide, they will come back if your content is good.
7. Non-standard links, hyperlinks should be underlined, hyperlinks should be obvious, there’s no reason to confuse novice users. Also strikethrough is being used to indicate a visited link – this is silly and should be avoided as it can be easily confused with corrections which is what strikethrough should be use for.
8. Over using Flash, Flash requires a plug-in, don’t use it unless it actually provides functionality which you cannot gain through other means.
9. Browser incompatibility, check what your pages look like on other browsers.
10. Scrolling text, marquees, and constantly running animations.
11. Complex URLs, they are not good for search engine hits or usability. Avoid.  
12. Long scrolling pages, break it up, use excerpts if you have to.
13. Poor navigation. Try and find some old content on your site. Is it easy?
14. Overly long download times. Use Photoshop or other applications to optimize images for the net. Read points 12 and 8 again.
15. Too many animations. They are hard on the eye. If you must use them, use for emphasis.

Even in an ever changing environment, such as the net, you must always consider the user experience before and above everything else.

Following on from the article Ten Writing Errors That Makes Your Blog Less Good, I want to look at some more writing tips.

Writingclasses.com lists George Orwell’s 12 Writing Tips, some key points include:

• What am I trying to say?
• Could I put it more shortly?
• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Using i.e or e.g correctly – The term i.e. means “that is”; e.g. means “for example.” And a comma follows both of them.

Words Words Words looks at The Top Ten Tips for Improving Your Writing (dead link), some of the highlights include:

• Before you can be a writer, you must be a reader.
• Know your audience.
• Simple is better.
• Don’t listen to your friends, listen to your critics.
• Write what you know.

Vandelay Design discusses 10 Keys to Effective Writing for the Web:

• Use headings and sub-headings.
• Use short paragraphs.
• Include links in the article.

Daily Writing Tips looks at 10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals:

• Spell small numbers out.
• Don’t start a sentence with a numeral.