I have been using WordPress for about 2 years now, and design website for all types of companies of different shapes and sizes…the following plugins are ones that I automatically include on EVERY one of my websites. These will enhance your functionality and also help you reach out to more readers.

Plugin List and Functionality:

All-in-one-seo-pack

all in one SEO pack helps you optimize you website without having to know much about search engine optimization. This plugin is great for people who don’t understand how to properly optimize their site.

rss-include-pages

RSS include pages will allow not only your posts to show up in your RSS feed, but it will also display your pages in the feed

contact-form-7

contact for 7 will help you quickly and efficiently setup a contact form for your website. I have also used it many times to create fallible applications for companies.

exec-php

Exec-PHP will allow you to execute PHP codes in each of your posts, pages and widgets

sexybookmarks

SexyBookmarks will make it very each for your viewers/readers to push you content/articles directly to ALL the social networks with one click of a button!

statpress

statpress will quick show you real-time stats on your website activities. You will be able to spy on people and see exactly which page they are currently browsing. It will also show you how many people have viewed your website for that day, and it will archive each month so you can compare this months stats to last months…etc…

nextgen-gallery

Looking for a quick way to add a very stylish photo gallery to your website with all the bells and whistles? Nextgen-Gallery will help you do that

bm-custom-login

This is one of the coolest and easiest plugins to help you create a custom wordpress login form in less than 5 minutes. Install it, edit a PSD file, save it, upload it, and it’s done and ready to go!

tinymce-advanced

This plugin will make it easy to add more buttons to your post/page editor so it resemble using Microsoft Word

page-columnist

Install this plugin, activate it and you will be able to create beatifuly styled columns on all of your pages. This will not work in posts right now, but I’m sure they will extend the functionality sometime soon

I would strongly suggest that anyone using the Magic Mouse, should download this software and become familiar with it as it will make your life a WHOLE lot easier! I know it did mine.

Here is what I copied right off of the twitter website:

“Qualifications

• Active, passionate Twitter user
• Strong interest in technology/knowledge of the Internet industry
• Excellent communication skills, phenomenal written skills
• Minimum of one year experience in written customer support
• Experience working with working with administrative tools, help ticketing systems, forums, etc.
• Background supporting commercial, high profile, or celebrity users
• Written and oral fluency in Japanese, or Portuguese/Spanish
• Light experience with project/product management (desired)
• Background in QA, triage, and/or tools building (desired)
• Familiarity with Trac, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, and Campfire (desired)”

Here is a screenshot I took of the actual article off of twitters website:

I know they are only human, but I found this to be quite funny!

Twitter Account Management

• TweetDeck: This popular desktop widget offers great functionality for posting business tweets, including the ability to sort tweets into direct

messages, topics and keywords. For instance, you can set up a specific column for mentions of your company or industry, and another for those of your competitor. TweetDeck has a sleek Adobe Air interface that looks like a cockpit on your desktop. Plus, it integrates with Facebook.

• HootSuite: A fast-growing free Web service, HootSuite is perfect for businesses needing multiple Twitter profiles and multiple users. It allows you to easily schedule tweets and switch back and forth between accounts. The service also includes a URL-shortening service called “ow.ly” that lets you see how many times your links are clicked. HootSuite counts Google Enterprise, Steve Case and Threadless as users.

• CoTweet: Multiple people from the same company can communicate through a single Twitter account, thanks to CoTweet. Each person maintains his or her own profile and activity record. CoTweet boasts such customers as Macworld, Ford and Whole Foods. CoTweet is accepting private beta registration.

Contact Management & Directories

• FriendOrFollow.com: This is a powerful tool for seeing 1) which of the people you follow are following you back and 2) which people are following you, but you have yet to reciprocate.

• Twitoria: You may have a lot of followers, but how many of those are active? This simple application allows you to see which of your followers are active on Twitter over the last week, two weeks, month, two months, etc.

• WeFollow.com: It is a user-powered Twitter directory. Simply enter the tags you want to be known for (e.g. #socialmedia, #marketing, #measurement, etc.) and you’re finished.

• Twellow: This tool bills itself as the Twitter Yellow Pages. You can search for users by a wide range of categories. You can also add yourself to the group so people can find you.

• Just Tweet It: Another directory service that notifies you of new additions to people in your particular industry.

Tracking & Metrics

• TwitterCounter: This sleek tool lets you chart the number of followers over time, from last week to last month.

• Bit.ly: This incredibly useful tool not only shortens your URL but enables you to track metrics on how many people click on your links. This provides insight into what types of links resonate with your client base. Retailers, such as Dell, use bit.ly to track click-through rates.

• Twitalyzer: A new tool from the folks at WebAnalytics Demystified, Twitalyzer goes beyond basic metrics to show the influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity and a whole host of other metrics related to your Twitter account. Take one trip through Twitalyzer, and you’ll have a clear idea of where you need to focus to make your Twitter use more effective.

• Google Analytics: To measure the number of people visiting your website from the Twitter.com domain, try Google Analytics.

• Omniture: This enterprise Web analytics package recently added Twitter integration, enabling clients to view brand comments over time, influencers vs. detractors, and a host of other metrics.

Monitoring & Alert Services

• Search.Twitter.com: Though there are several options for monitoring what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, this one might be the easiest. And it’s free. Use this service to set up RSS feeds related to the words you care about. (Please note: It does have limitations, such as how far back in time you can go.)

• TweetBeep.com: This service is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Enter your keywords (e.g. company name, product, competitors, etc.) and receive regular updates whenever someone mentions those words in social media.

• Monitter: This new service provides a live streaming view of what people in your location are saying about your company or employees.

• Radian6 and Techrigy: These two enterprise-class monitoring tools help a company listen to conversations happening throughout the social media universe, not just Twitter. The tools are loaded with additional powerful functionality for managing your brand.

Marketing Tools

• TwtQpon: Use TwtQpon to create exclusive deals for your products or services, and share them with your followers.

• TwitterHawk: A novel marketing application, TwitterHawk connects you with people actively talking about your product or service within your area. For example, if you own a sandwich shop and someone in town tweets about getting a sandwich, you can automatically send them a customized response. The service costs five cent per tweet.

• TwitBacks.com and TwitterGallery.com: Want more than the design options that Twitter provides? Use either of these services to improve the look and feel of your Twitter page. TwitBacks.com allows you to provide additional business contact information, and a photo or logo as well.

Click here to see the Original Article

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Screenr does not require you to download any software to your computer, it is a web based recorder which means you can do it from where ever you’re at and won’t have to take you computer everywhere with you… just your webcam. The web based recorder is compatible with Macs and PC’s.

If you are already a Screenr user, and have been using it frequently, let us know what you think about it!

All of these features are now under the “Appearance” tab

1. Menus
2. Background
3. Header

Menus

You can now create your menu bar right from the dashboard of your site. Not only does it let you create your menu, but you can also drag and drop the menu tabs to be in the order that you would like them to be.

You can also add links to your menu that link to other websites and not your own. This is a very cool feature because you used to have to actually go into the markup and you the <li></li> in order to list links to other websites on your menubar.

Background

You can now change the display options of your background from the “background” tab under “appearance”. You have the option to position left, center, right and even reapeat the background, make it scroll and also change the color of the background.

You will also be able to upload new background right from the “background tab”.

Header

Here you will be able to upload a custom image to be show at the top of your blogs. It allows you to crop each header to fit the way you’d like it to be viewed.

These are some awesome new features that WordPress has added to their new CMS and I am really, really looking forward to the release of the actual platform. Click here to download the WordPress 3.0 beta CMS.

Not only does adding colorful images to each blog drive more traffic but it makes your blog look and feel more professional and much more organized.

Here is a quick way to add custom images to your blog posts.

Copy this code:

And paste it inside of your index.php file where ever you’d like the thumbnail to show up in your post.

The next thing you’re going to want to do is create a new image in photoshop with the dimensions of 570 x 190. When you are finished editing your image you’re going to title it default.png and FTP it to your images directory located at http://www.yourwebsite.com/images (if the directory isn’t there, create it).

If you’d like to have a custom image show up on each post and not your default.png image, then you will want to create a new image for each post, upload it to your blog, copy the URL link to your where the image is located. Once you have the URL go to the post you want the image to be displayed on and under the “custom field” tab, type post-img as the “name” and then paste the link into the “value” field.

Click the “add custom field” button, publish the article to your blog and you should now see your new custom image displayed on your blog.

You can divide your page up into as many columns as you like and control them right from the GUI interface. You don’t have to go digging through your CSS to try and style it up, it works like a charm right out of the box! I would suggest using this on all your website’s because it just makes styling content so much easier. Here is the site that I used it on Bohm Associates

What Twitterfeed does is allow you to go out to popular blogs and copy their RSS links, and paste them into this website. Once you have pasted the RSS link into Twitterfeed, you can link the feed to either your twitter/facebook account.

Then you can tell Twitterfeed to automatically post articles from that blog to your twitter and facebook acount every 30 minutes or so. What this does is help you leverage your time while still attracting the crowd you want to be following you, and not have to spend all your time on the Social Networks.Twitterfeed is a MUST HAVE if you plan on getting anywhere on twitter.

Social Oomph is what you would want to use if you’re planning on automatically having message sent to the people who follow you on twitter.  You can also use Social Oomph to automatically post blogs/articles for you at specific times of the day. You can track your twitter stats through this tool. This is also a must have if you are trying to utilize twitter the correct way.

Twitter is here to stay and is not going anywhere anytime soon! It is in my opinion the most powerful site on the web today. I have been using it for about a year now and have only recently started understanding how to properly use it.

I am blown away at the relationships that you can grow in such a short period of time with people who really want to get to know you.

OK, so you want to know how to use twitter in the most powerful way possible for your business? Well here is a break down of all of twitter’s features.

Twitter Terms:

• Following
• Followers
• Listed
• Lists You Follow
• @
• Direct Messages
• Searches
• #hashtag
• RT (Retweet)

Highlighted Twitter Key Features!

Following: When you are following someone that means that their tweets will be displayed on your profile, which in return means that everyone who is viewing your profile will also see their tweets.

Followers: When someone is following you that means that they will see all of your tweets on their profile. It is the same thing as following only reversed.

Lists: Twitter Lists are Twitter’s long awaited “groups” feature. They offer a way for you to bunch together other users on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they’re up to. That’s because Lists aren’t just static listings of users, but rather curated Twitter streams of the latest tweets from a specified set of users. (mashable)

@sign: The @ sign is what you want to use when you are trying to tweet a message to a specific person. So if you were to send just me a message you would insert @justincron and then your message.

#Hashtags: this is probably one of the coolest features that twitter has to offer. What this feature does is allow for you to start a “live chat” over twitter. Something that a lot of people don’t know is that you can make up #hashtags (ie: #justincron) then when other people want to join your “chat” they will just type their message and then include the #hashtag at the very end of their sentence, which will make their tweet go directly into that “chat”.

Retweet: Retweet is when you see someone elses message that sounds interesting, and you retweet it to all of your friends so that they can see it on their profiles also.
I hope this helps you understand twitter a little better! It is such a powerful tool is used the right way.

If you know of any hidden features that twitter has to off then please feel free to share it by leaving a comment below this article. Thanks!