WordPress Plugins | New Tricks Web Design

Gravity Forms Gives Your WordPress Site Super Powers

Posted on May 16, 2012 Written by Judi Leave a Comment

gravity forms superhero If you have a WordPress site, you can give your site abilities you only dreamed of when you install the Gravity Forms Plugin. It is a premium plugin which means there is a fee involved. The personal level license starts at 39.00 and the developer license is 199.00. It is well worth it and if you are a developer, it is essential. Why do I love Gravity Forms? Let me count the ways:

Gravity Forms is easy. You simply name the form and start dragging fields into it. You edit the title of the filed and add directions to filling out the filed if needed and you are good to go. Really, a cave man could do it.
You can create simple contact forms with almost any form maker. The real beauty of Gravity Forms is the ability to make most any kind of form, such as a lead generation form or a product or service purchase form, which sends you the completed form responses in an e-mail and keeps it in the database. You can then export the form data into a csv file.
Gravity Forms works with PayPal Pro or [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress Plugins

30 WordPress Plugins You Can Count On

Posted on August 17, 2011 Written by Judi 4 Comments

I have been using WordPress for about five years now. I remember the days when you had to upload plugins through FTP. Thankfully for the newcomers it is easier now but the amount of plugins is rather overwhelming. I was doing a presentation for my WordPress Meetup in Atlanta and decided to make a list of all of my tried and true plugins. For the most part these are easy to install, configure and utilize to extend the functionality of your WordPress site.

Aksimet -Best comment and trackback spam prevention ever. Free for personal bloggers and starts at 60 per year for businesses making over 500.00.
WordPress.com Stats -Loads right in your dashboard for easy monitoring of your pageviews, tells you which posts and pages are the most popular, where your site traffic is coming from, and what links people click when they leave your site.
All in One SEO – I have been using All in One SEO to rewrite my site page and blog post titles and descriptions from the start. This plugin allows you to use more reader friendly titles on your site but use a Title and description more search engine friendly behind the scenes. It also lets you configure it so that the search engines just index your content once and not all of the other forms of it that are possible with such things as category and author archives. Get it and Google it for more information on the many configuration choices.
Scribe -This is a premium plugin that costs about 30.00 per month. It will teach you to write optimized posts. Write your post for your readers, fill out All in One SEO and then run it through Scribe for a grade on how the search engines would see your entry. It then tells you how to fix a low score. The Catholic schoolgirl in me can’t stand not to get 100 on a test!
W3 Total Cache - This plugin is used by all the pros to make their sites load faster by caching every aspect of your site. This is great for readers and also a factor in ranking.
Gravity Forms - This is a honey of a plugin and worth the money. It is 39.00 for a single site, 99.00 for three sites and 199.00 for a developers license good for unlimited sites. You can create forms in a breeze, even complex and interactive forms. It is very user friendly and there are addons for other programs like Paypal, Freshbooks, and MailChimp. [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress Plugins

Plugins for the people

Posted on February 26, 2009 Written by Judi Leave a Comment

Widget World

While wordpress.com has tons of plugins readily available, wordpress.org is a plugin picnic with over 4,000 available for FREE. Here are a few of the less known but oh-so interesting plugins:

Daily Doses

There’s a plugin to display a Daily Dilbert Comic on your site. Or, you can add a bible verse, using a Verse of the Day feed. Ayah of the Day translates a verse from the Holy Quran. You can choose between English and Farsi translation.

Saint du jour displays the saint of the day, “according to the timetable of the ordinary and/or the extraordinary form of Roman Catholic rite”.

There are widgets to post French, German, Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish Words of the Day. Some have audible options.

Of course you can post the Daily Horoscope – there’s even a Romanian version.

Psychic Read

Promises to secretly reveal what your readers most want to read….so you can give it to them. That way, they’ll keep coming back to your blog.

Next of Kin

This one may be my favourites. Next Of Kin monitors your visits to your WordPress site. If you fail to visit your blog after a specified period of time, the system will automatically send an email to whoever you choose notifying them of the bad news. You get to personalize the text of your notification email ahead of time.