THE BLOG

>> Why I love wordpress

I recently converted my website into a custom WordPress template. Thanks to Tim Whitacre and Argyll Studios – they basically took my existing design (and functionality I wanted to keep) and converted it into WordPress. I have the blogging end here and I also have two pages that are static that I can change easily and at any time on my own. I can add more pages if I feel the need, and it is easy and seamless to do this.

Wow, I sound like an infomercial – but to be honest, I think this makes sense right now for businesses to do this. It is economical, the transition is fairly seamless and it allows you to easily update and optimize your content through tags, linking, and automatically update your social networks. You can SEO like a superstar and have lots of time to sit back and relax…

Plus, WordPress is FREE. All you are really paying for is the custom template.

WordPress has some great plugins too. Plugins are like Kryptonite for your site. Here are some top picks:

SEO Title Tag
Search engine optimizes your blog’s title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, UltimateTagWarrior tag page – indeed, any URL! And will auto-insert the tag name into the title on tag pages generated by UltimateTagWarrior plugin. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags.

Twitter Friendly Links
Your very own TinyURL within your OWN domain! If you DO promote your blog posts in Twitter, then you MUST make your links look cool!

Akismet
Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

Google Analytics for WordPress
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic click out and download tracking.

TweetThis
Popular Twitter plugin inserts “Tweet This” links so your readers can share posts with one click. Automatically tweets new posts via OAuth.