We would like to recommend you a website that is going to make it QUICK AND EASY for you to learn everything you ever wanted to know about WordPress. They have over 74 top-quality video tutorials and they keep adding 4-8 new ones each and every month! Some of the many topics covered in these video tutorials are…

• How to install and configure WordPress.
• Using WordPress Themes to give your site a beautiful look.
• Using WordPress Plugins to add endless functionality to your site.
• How to use images, videos, and mp3 files on your site or blog.

Below are links to some useful online resources to help you make your website look even more professional: online image editors, background and favicon generators, color schemers, icon depositories.

Online Image Editors

• pixlr
• splashup

Favicon Generator

• www.favicon.cc

Background Generators

• BgMaker
• Stripe Generator

Color Schemers

• Color Scheme Designer
• Color Hunter

Icon Stocks

• www.findicons.com
• www.iconfinder.com

What We Like In and Why We Do Recommend Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro 4 (PAP) is one of the best affiliate management software products available today. Created by Quality Unit, PAP has a worldwide reach and positive feedback. Consider these key features that make this program stand out among the rest.

Post Affiliate Pro 4 has excellent tracking support. You can track standard cookies, flash cookies, and IP addresses. Since PAP has this capability, visitors can use multiple browsers and the program will still accurately track the sale. This is one of the finest points of this affiliate management software.

Another reason why we consider this to be a top program is the customization features. We are able to create a theme, adjust the templates to suit our preferences, and set our own commission parameters with as many tiers as we desire. Other customizable features include minimum payout for affiliates, the payment date, and payout gateways. We can also add new pages and sections to create more content.

Direct Link is an innovative feature that allows you to use your own URL rather than the standard redirect links. This is extremely beneficial, as it can help to make these affiliate links look natural for your visitors.

Post Affiliate Pro 4 also offers a dynamic selection of plugins. There is already a great selection, and the best part is that Quality Unit develops new plugins on a regular basis. You can also submit a request for a new plugin if you think of a specific function you would like to perform on your website.

Split Commission is a special PAP feature that allows you to send payment to all involved in sales. This is better than only sending payment to the first referrer or the last referrer. In essence, when someone lands on your website and buys something, you can pay commission to multiple affiliates. That way, if a single visitor links through more than one affiliate you can split the commission between each of them. After all, sometimes it takes more than one person to land a sale. This also means that each of your affiliates will be more motivated to sell.

In addition to all of this, PAP provides fraud protection. With the GeoIP feature, you will not need to worry about sales fraud, sign-up fraud, or click fraud. If fraud is detected, GeoIP will prevent commission from coming out of your pocket. You will also be provided with multiple promotional materials through this affiliate management software. Various types of banners include HTML, flash, image, text link, peel and zip.

You can also rebrand ebooks with ease using the Rebrand PDF feature. Once you create and ebook, and convert if to a PDF, you can upload it to PAP. Your affiliates can then adjust the links so that it contains the links to their personal affiliate pages. Most other programs simply don’t offer this great feature.

Post Affiliate Pro 4 comes in four different versions – Xpress, Professional, Ultimate, and Network. They come with different sets of features. Based on your needs, you can go for the Ultimate version ($999) or basic versions like Xpress, or Pro ($199 and $299 respectively). You can upgrade from a lower version to a higher version any time you want.

Money Back Guarantee

Quality Unit offers a 30-day money back guarantee for Post Affiliate Pro 4. If you are not satisfied with the software, you can place a request and get your money back within 30 days of purchase.

Go and grab PAP for yourself!

The WordPress community has thousands of plugins created by developers and many more are emerging on a daily basis. It must be remembered however that not all these plugins are useful. Choose with care when deciding which plugin will be most beneficial to your site. One of the better plugins that can really serve a useful purpose is the Widget Context.

This is a WordPress plugin that enables users to customize and control widget placement, without any changes in the theme files. It is easier to use than the earlier plugins Widget Reloaded and Widget Logic.

There are several reasons why we recommend the Widget Context as a useful plugin for the management of widgets. The plugin has many features that make it a convenient and effective tool for extending WordPress functionality.

Features

• Widgets can be shown on specific pages
• Widgets can be hidden on certain pages
• You can hide widgets, so that they cannot be seen
• Widgets can also be shown on any URL that can be listed as “target by URL” text box
• The settings can be added at the end of each widget after the installation of the Widget Context plug in
• This tool can be very useful if your site theme needs multiple widgets and you need to manage your widgets often.

Managing Widgets

WordPress plugins come in a variety of shapes and sizes and often it is difficult to judge whether a particular plugin is useful or not. Some are very badly written and may ruin the website or compromise your WordPress installation. The Widget Context however, is one of several different plugins that help you to exercise greater control over the location of widgets. We feel that widget management should include the following:

1. Location on page type; that is whether it is a single post, blog page or category archive
2. Location on specific category, that is setting a widget to appear or hide on a post that is from a particular category
3. Be able to place a widget on a particular URL, as needed

Our Choice

Widget Context is certainly one of the better WordPress plugins and is a utility that is useful and enhances the functionality of WordPress. The sidebar problems that affect those who come in from other CMS are solved by Widget Context, as you can specify the exact location of widgets and manage them effectively. Widget Context also gives you an extra menu within the configuration box for each individual widget, on the widgets page. Apart from this, Widget Context remembers the individual widget settings even if you deactivate the plugin and then revive it at some other time. You can therefore configure your widgets according to your needs in Widget Context and then come back to it later without losing the earlier settings.

Widget Context Website

The NextGEN Gallery plugin utilizes some of the interesting possibilities of JQuery and AJAX/Web 2.0 technologies and can also handle multiple galleries. It was developed by Alex Rabe who studied all the different image galleries and decided to develop one with a simple back end administration that could handle multiple galleries. It has been downloaded nearly 2.5 million times and has resulted in the creation of a number of other plugins that interact with it.

What NextGEN Gallery Can Do

We have been waiting for just such a plugin that can manage and display photographs when NextGEN gallery hit the market. The NextGEN gallery provides a user-friendly interface for the handling of all kinds of images through a group of admin pages and the display is extremely attractive. Another reason we would recommend the NextGEN gallery is for the extra add-ons that can be downloaded to enhance the functionality even more. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

We are already using the NextGEN gallery and find it amazing as far as image management is concerned. With the NextGEN gallery, you can sort out different albums and create your own sets of images, upload a zip file with photographs, add a watermark to text or images and several other functions. There is a multiple CSS Stylesheet that enables an attractive shadow effect to your thumbnails and you can set up a fully-integrated slideshow.

Other Features

For any online marketing campaign, images whether graphics, images, photographs or any other are crucial. When you add these to your website, it becomes imperative to have a tool that helps you to manage them. The NestGEN Gallery plugin does just that; it takes away all the headaches involved in image management and ensures that your photographs enhance the look of your website.

Customized templates can be added to your theme: Templates can be tailored to suit your theme requirements and added to the site

Cooliris Effect:

The Cooliris Effect can be uploaded on your gallery to give you additional ways to play with your images and photographs. You can construct a Cooliris Wall for your site with the latest techniques.

Thumbnail Generator:

The AX-based thumbnail generator gives you your thumbnails without any server limitation during the batch process.

Image Management:

You can move images from one gallery to another without a problem.

Sidebar Widget:

This enables movement of images from the sidebar.

NextGEN Gallery has several other components that make it one of the most useful plugins in the WordPress directory. It can be translated into 30 languages and has a translation downloader. It can be integrated with image uploader and there is meta data support.

NextGEN Gallery Home Page.

Breadcrumb NavXT is the successor to the popular WordPress plugin Breadcrumb Navigation XT and this plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress powered blog or website. Among the many thousands of plugins generated by the WordPress community this can be rated as one of the most useful, as it helps to link pages through the use of Breadcrumb trails. These breadcrumb trails can be customized to suit the requirements of any kind of website that runs WordPress. With an interface for easy administration, setting of options is a simple affair an a direct class access is available for developers of themes and more sophisticated users.

How it works

Breadcrumb NavXT is a WordPress plugin compatible with WordPress versions 3.0 and upwards. Breadcrumb trails are a good supplementary navigation system as it helps in using the site in a methodical way. We found this is particularly true for those that use WordPress as a CMS. These Breadcrumbs usually appear below the title bars or headers at the top of a web page and facilitate links to each previous page that the user has gone through to arrive at the current page. This creates a trail for the user to get back to the starting point and this is quite a popular addition in websites to enable users to identify their location on it.

Mtekk and Hakre created Breadcrumb NavXT that has a new PHP function to help in the formation of a dynamic Breadcrumb. We recommend it as we find that there are numerous options for configuration that enable you to manage the Breadcrumbs on your blog or website.

Features

As Breadcrumb NavXT reveals the page hierarchy in a consistent manner, it can provide SEO benefits. If websites have a number of pages, breadcrumb navigation makes moving around easier and quicker. It also acts as a visual aid as it shows the location of the user within the hierarchy of the website, thereby making it an effective source of contextual information as far as the landing page is concerned. Breadcrumb navigation increased page views and also makes visitors get deeper into the content. We find that using this plugin enhances the visitor-to-page-view ratio considerably. If your blog or website has this problem, we recommend the Breadcrumb NavXT to be the solution.

With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0 you can import and export your settings to/from a XML file. There are several other useful features that we believe are essential for a WordPress-enabled website or blog. You can place the breadcrumb trail in reverse order and it also enables you to output each breadcrumb wrapped in &lt'li> tags.

Benefits

Here are just some of the benefits of using Breadcrumb NavXT:

User Convenience:

It is a good supplementary method of navigation. On a multiple page website, the visitor can move around and go to higher categories easily and quickly. The visitor does not have to keep clicking on the ‘back’ button every time to navigate from one page to another. Visitors can utilize the breadcrumb trail to go back and forth on the website without any problem.

Less screen space:

The Breadcrumb NavXT uses very little space on the screen, as the breadcrumbs are all neatly arranged horizontally at the top of the page and are simply styled. There is no content overload and if used correctly the plugin is extremely useful for additional navigation.

Visitor Retention:

The Breadcrumb NavXT is a great tool to attract first-time viewers to go through your website, after they come to the landing page. The breadcrumb trail would be a way to tempt them to click on to view the higher category of web pages and get to know more about the subject. This ensures greater visitor retention which in turn results in greater profits.

Breadcrumb NavXT Home.

Any online marketing campaign relies heavily on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, that is the methods by which a website is ranked on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. One of the tools that help to enhance SEO of a site is the Google XML Sitemap. This becomes even more necessary if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. The crucial factor here is to make it easy for the SEO bots (robots or spiders) to go through your website, as the easier it is for them to do this, the higher the chances of a good search engine ranking.

How does the Google XML Sitemap work?

This plugin helps in the generation of an XML-sitemap on the WordPress blog and this format is supported by the major search engines. The XML-sitemap was first launched by Google in 2005 and subsequently in 2006, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com adopted it. Sitemaps are as essential tool to improve SEO of a website and this is accomplished by ensuring that all the web pages of a particular site can be located.

With the Google XML Sitemap, it becomes much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs.

Features

The Google XML Sitemap has several useful features covering a wide range of functions.

• The plugin is available for all WordPress versions since 1.5
• The Google XML Sitemap does not need any PHP skills or file changes
• There is an user interface that helps with the customization of all parameters
• The Google XML Sitemap is available in many languages
• A sitemap is automatically generated for all types of WordPress pages
• Based on the number of comments, the Google XML Sitemap evaluates and prioritizes each post
• The Google XML Sitemap notifies Ask.com, Google, Bing and Yahoo about any new content
• The Google XML Sitemap includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap
• The Google XML Sitemap generates a static XML file as well as a zipped version

A Sitemaps XML file is crucial to have if you’re interested in helping search engine spiders like Googlebot accurately index the content of your website. Whenever a page is added to your site, it is necessary to inform Google and other search engines about the change, so that a spider can come to check the new information. With thee Google XML Sitemap, this is done automatically each time there is a modification in the website. We therefore highly recommend it as a very useful tool to give your site higher SEO ranking.

Google XML Sitemap Website.

Any online business depends on a successful SEO strategy. Proper utilization of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques would ensure enhanced exposure, recognition and knowledge of your website, which again would result in the generation of free traffic. A successful web presence is reliant on targeted search engine traffic and the guiding of such traffic to your product or services.

WordPress SEO

The All in One SEO Pack is a WordPress plugin is packed with features that improve the search engine ranking of your website. With over 450,000 visitors on Google search engine, we have found that this plugin is an indispensable tool in guiding visitors to your website through the search engines. There are 2 versions; one is the Basic SEO and the other Professional SEO with the latter having some additional features

Features of Basic SEO for WordPress

We recommend the Basic SEO for those who are not too familiar with these techniques. It has the basic features to help with SEO positioning and is a good plugin for first-time users.

• You can configure and optimize the All in One SEO Pack Plugin
• You can create, configure, and optimize the following: sitemap.xml, sitemap.xml.gz and robots.txt
• After each post, the plugin enables automatic submissions to the major search engines including Google
• Basic SEO enables the evaluation of XHTML and PHP SEO best practices
• You can also implement the appropriate mod-rewrite structure

Features of Professional SEO for WordPress

The Professional SEO version has many other features in addition to the ones in Basic SEO. These include a monthly SEO report that gives information about the movement of the SEO ranking of your site. Apart from this one useful feature, there are several others that are given below:

• You can set up and configure Google Analytics
• You can also configure Apache 404 error handling
• You can utilize W3C Validations for your Home Page
• You can check the validation of XHTML/CSS
• You can utilize Image and Alt Tag Optimization
• The plugin enables you to manage appropriate crawl rate
• You can check the optimization for desired keywords

The All In One SEO Pack Pro Version is a vital component in managing the SEO strategy of all your websites, as the many automated tools enable diverse functions in SEO, which would otherwise have taken much more effort and time.

How to use All in One SEO Pack

This WordPress plugin helps in addressing most on-page ranking issues and we recommend it highly for this vital function.

Titles:

It is important to make sure that your titles are being revised and that your post titles contain your key phrases. The meta title is crucial for SEO ranking.

Descriptions:

Once the pages are ranked in the major search engines, you need to ensure that the meta descriptions are in place. The preferred source for your post description is your post excerpt. If you do not want to write a description for each post, you can generate them automatically with the help of the All in One SEO Pack.

Keywords:

The keywords that you need for ensuring a good ranking on the search engines can all be generated by the SEO Pack from your different categories. The plugin also generates them from the Ultimate Tag Warrior and beginning with WordPress 2.3 would be utilizing the built-in tagging system. WP 2.3.x tags are the preferred keyword source.

Duplication:

The SEO Pack also enables the no-index and other functions for dealing with the duplication of content in the archive, category or tag pages.

The All In One SEO Pack Home.

This is the best and easiest to use code highlighter plugin to display and highlight code in your WordPress posts. Most of the WordPress code highlighter plugins need the WYSIWYG editor to be disabled and in most cases these plugins will not work if the WYSIWYG editor is enabled. It is an annoying and time-consuming job to keep enabling and disabling the editor for the plugin work properly.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without having to modify the code at all. It uses the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev to do the highlighting and supports all of the package’s parameters via short-code attributes. You can easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without losing its formatting or making any manual changes and with minimal editing.

Features

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved is a WordPress plugin that we think is a must-have and we strongly recommend it for its varied features and functionality.

• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved supports a wide range of syntax highlighting for loads of different languages
• It enables line numbering with the ability to highlight certain lines
• There is a toolbar, ability to print, copy to clipboard or view the source from the menu in the top right (Hover over top right corner to enable it)
• The plugin presents code in a clean and organized fashion
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved does not cause any performance issues with your server

Why Use SyntaxHighlighter Evolved?

We recommend that you use SyntaxHighlighter Evolved if you have a website or blog that is powered by WordPress and is one that is about website development or programming, since it is especially useful with posts that include code snippets, tutorials, articles and so on. This plugin is indispensable for arranging clear, clean and well-organized code neatly in your posts. We find that SyntaxHighlighter Evolved makes it totally easy to post syntax-highlighted code by just a small statement and this in turn makes it easier for the reader. The plugin has the ability to make code snippets simpler to understand and interpret than the standard display method.

The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved method looks better, is cleaner and is much less work than the standard method. The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin also has some useful features which can also be used to get the best out of your syntax-highlighted code snippets. It supports most program language including PHP, CSS, HTML, C, Javacript and others.

Benefits

The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved has some special features that enable certain functions in a much less complex way than the earlier methods. These are:

1. No modification needed , especially to your theme.
2. It’s much easier to discuss or refer to particular line of code, if there are line numbers and the The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved supports these numbers with a little modification.
3. The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved supports the WordPress Visual Editor.

The SyntaxHighlighter Evolved can be installed from the WordPress plugin admin panel and there is no need to change any default settings. You just open your Visual Editor and write your new post and if you need to insert a piece of code in the post, all you have to do is write it in the correct format. Along with the simplicity and ease of use, it is the functionality of this plugin that makes us recommend it so strongly for any kind of Internet marketing project.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved Website.

WP Super Cache is a caching plugin for WordPress that generates static HTML versions of pages and posts and updates them at intervals of your choice. These files are served directly by Apache and speeds up WordPress blogs. This reduces the need for server-side processes to generate a post or page whenever a visitor requests them. The WP Super Cache has been seen to improve page response times of unprimed caches by 259.1% by decreasing page load time from 9.56s to 3.69s for even a content-dense blog or web page.

The WP Super Cache is an offshoot of the WP Cache 2 created by Ricardo Galli Granada that caches blog pages and delivers these without any access to the database. The WP Cache 2 however still involved loading the PHP engine to serve the cached files. WP Super Cache has overcome that and generates HTML files without having to load a single line of PHP. This is a distinct advantage in caching web pages and blogs.

How It Works

WP Super Cache was created to imitate the conventional manual page caching method, but to execute it in an automated fashion. When a viewer who has not left a comment or has not logged in to your site visits it, he is offered a static HTML page from the super-cache sub-directory within the WordPress cache directory. If one navigates to the cache directory, then one can see a replica of the permalink structure and the HTML files within the directories.

Leading Features

• The WP Super Cache has a plugin and hooks system, which is built in to change how or when pages are cached.
• The WP Super Cache works normally with WordPress MU in VHOST or non-VHOST configurations. Performance is enhanced when the cache files of each blog post are identified by the plugin.
• The usual WP Cache files are divided into two and the meta files are entered in another directory. This makes the entire process of scanning and updating the cache much faster.
• The WP Super Cache has a ‘lock down’ button that keeps the static cache files secure so that they are not deleted when a new entry is made.
• WP Super Cache acts as an automatic ‘lock down’ system for each page on your website. The static files can be regenerated when serving an outdated file and this reduces the load on a busy server to a substantial extent.
• WP Super Cache has a far better support structure for Microsoft Windows.

Benefits

We recommend WP Super Cache as one of must-have plugins for a WordPress site. The plugin works to make a copy of web pages on the server and thereby speeds up page load time and also lowers resource consumption. In Internet marketing, getting your website ranked on the major search engines is crucial. WP Super Cache speeds up page load which is one of the factors that enables search engines to index the site. If a page takes very long to load, there is every chance that the search engine bots would move on without marking it.

WP Super Cash Home Page.