10+ Important Wordpress Plugins for Aspiring Designers

If you want to show off your web design credentials to the world, then WordPress is the perfect blogging platform to use: it’s simple, accessible and highly customisable. Nevertheless, you’re not going to be able to create a professional standard WordPress blog with great work and creativity alone, you’re also going to need some rather nifty plugins.

There are literally thousands of plugins currently available and, believe me, sifting through them can be an arduous task: some are absolutely brilliant, but many more are mediocre or totally pointless. The 15 superior plugins outlined below are all perfectly suited to the aspiring web designer looking to show off their wares. They’ll boost levels of traffic to your site, integrate your blog with Facebook, increase your productivity and make for a more interactive and interesting visitor experience.

WP Greet Box

You can greatly increase the readership of your blog with this ingenious plugin that provides visitors to your site with a tailored welcome message. New visitors can be invited to subscribe to your RSS feed, Digg your posts, or follow you on Twitter, depending on how they have clicked onto your site. Smashing Magazine, a site devoted to web design, has used this plugin, so you know it’s good!

NextGEN Gallery

NextGen is fast becoming the industry standard for displaying images on a WordPress blog. It’s simple and in many ways unexciting, but looks extremely professional. It comes with a Flash slideshow and a straightforward back-end, making image management that little bit easier.

FlippingBook

If NextGen occupies the more basic end of the image plugin spectrum, then FlippingBook occupies the more creative. You can use this plugin to organise images into individual interactive albums, which can be flicked through just like a book.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache protects your site against the huge spikes in traffic that can result from a front-page appearance on Digg for example, or promotion on a social networking site. It does so by generating static HTML files from your blog, which are then served to the vast majority of your visitors.

Facebook Connect

This much-needed plugin helps to promote your design work by integrating WordPress and your Facebook page. You can login to your WordPress blog using your Facebook account, invite Facebook friends to visit your blog and send blog comments to your Facebook profile feed.

Global Translator

You’ll be able to promote your web design to new and diverse global markets with this fantastic plugin. It instantly translates your blog into 41 languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and even Maltese.

Post Ideas

Got a great idea for a post, but no time to publish it? Like an online notebook, this plugin lets you record ideas for future posts in WordPress. This way, ideas will never be lost or forgotten and you can save paper in the process!

Sliding Panel

If you’ve got a large client list and endless examples of previous work, then you might struggle to upload everything you want to your blog without it getting cluttered and confusing. This space-saving plugin adds a panel to the top of your blog which opens and closes to hide (or expose) content.

WP Wall

Following in Facebook’s footsteps, this plugin adds a “wall” to the sidebar of your blog onto which visitors can quickly add comments about posts or your blog in general. The comments are internally handled by WordPress so that you can moderate their content.

Insights

Insights is a great tool for inserting images, videos, maps and so much more into your posts. Simply enter a keyword and choose from the Flickr images, Youtube videos, Wikipedia links and Google Maps that appear below.

Page Link Manager

This easy-to-use plugin adds an administration panel to your dashboard, allowing you to choose which links are included in your blog’s navigation. Link to the posts that you are most proud of and best exemplify your design style.

About Me Widget

An “About Me” sidebar is a great means of communicating brand identity to potential clients and other visitors. Of course, it’s already possible to create such a sidebar in WordPress, but this widget really simplifies the process, solving all alignment and formatting issues.