Connor BrookeThere are plenty of websites out there that utilize a CMS to make it easier for non-programmers to maintain and update the website. WordPress is the most popular CMS out there, particularly for blogging, as it allows you to simply copy the text straight from a Microsoft Word document and manipulate with it, using the same skillset that one acquires using MS Word. The process of customizing your website can be as simple as buying a custom WordPress theme – although there are plenty of decent themes available for free as well – and making a few tweaks and adjustments. You can install any number of useful plugins to help you shape your website in a way that will best serve your and your viewers’ needs.
What you need will depend on the type of website you are running, but those listed in this article can cover all your bases. These will be great for blogs, online stores and basically any company or organization that offers information about themselves and their services on a WordPress website.
uSquare
If you want a compact and effective way to display information about your team, your products or designs, then uSquare is the right WordPress plugin for you. As its name suggests, it features a squared grid, alternatively displaying images and text related to the image. For instance – a team member or product name and function. By clicking an image you open up additional information that is fully scrollable and you also gain access to social network and email icons, as well as additional customizable icons at the bottom that can be scrolled left and right.
The best thing is that the plugin is responsive and it fully supports smartphone and tablet resolutions. You have plenty of design options, so you can be pretty precise about customizing the plugin to fit your website.
Smart Slider
The Smart Slider plugin gives you a truly beautiful, highly customizable and responsive slider design. You can opt for a basic slider design, where you can scroll images left and right via arrows or you can go for a more visually appealing design and add cool effects. Some slider options include horizontal and vertical accordion sliders, simple horizontal and vertical sliders and photo sliders with unique captions for each image, as well as different themes to choose from.
The theme builder allows you to create a unique theme, choosing from a wide variety of skins. You can customize colors, backgrounds, fonts and add a range of effects to create the best possible viewing experience for the visitors of your website.
Rating-Widget
Rating Widget is a simple, nice little plugin that provides a much needed basic function for your blog – it allows visitors to rate content using either a five star system or a thumbs up/thumbs down system. You can also have separate rating methods in place for both the article and the comments, e.g. one to five stars for the article and thumbs up or thumbs down for the comments.
The Rating Widget is highly customizable, offering plenty of visual solutions that allow you to seamlessly incorporate a rating system onto your websites design. You can also choose from an extensive list of languages, which makes the plugin easier to work with.
Social Media Feather
Another important aspect to consider is sharing your posts through social networks. What you are looking for here is something unobtrusive – something that is elegant, yet easily accessible. The Social Media Feather is a plugin that allows you to share your posts and pages on social networks with ease and without seeming pushy. The plugin doesn’t use JavaScript which means that it is easy to load.
The icons can be displayed in a number of interesting skins and there are 2 effects available – greying out and fading. This contributes to the aesthetic value of your website. Featured social sharing websites include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Rotating Tabs Widget
This plugin allows you to display a panel with several different tabs that can rotate to show various sections of content. It is great for displaying recent blog posts from any custom taxonomy or simply displaying links to various relevant pages of your website.
Having rotating tabs in a widget makes it easier to showcase a large amount of your recent material, including recent or most popular articles, latest comments and recent tweets, and break them down into categories that are easy for searching a required topic. For something so compact and unobtrusive, it gives you plenty of functionality.
YouTube Master
YouTube Master is a simple, yet very useful plugin that allows you to display YouTube videos on your website effectively, including entire playlists and a subscribe button. It is particularly useful if you have a YouTube channel and wish to display your video library on the website. The size of the videos is adjustable and they can be displayed in any widget position.
Since the plugin was designed for and coded in HTML5, it eliminates the chance for problems occurring and allows very quick loading times. This is very important for websites that rely vastly on video material, e.g. web stores with product reviews. Simple to implement and functional, this WordPress plugin is definitely worth having.
Author Box
The Author Box is a plugin that allows you to efficiently present a good deal of information about the author of an article within the confines of a small box at the bottom of the page. There are several scrollable tabs available that provide basic information about the author, list his recent posts, and let you connect with him or her via social media.
The tabs can be positioned on top or on the left and you can adjust the content for as many different users as you like. It is a very useful tool that allows you to provide all of the essential information about the user without taking up too much space.
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These seven plugins will allow you to bring full functionality to your blog or company website. Putting up helpful articles or information about the company and its practices is essential for anyone looking to add a bit of traffic to their website, and these are just the kind of tools you will need to deal with the various aspects of running a well-designed and highly functional website.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Smart Slider works :)