Free Plugin: Exclude Pages from WordPress Navigation Menus

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Nov 032011
 

Creating pages easily is one of the best features of WordPress. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before your navigation menu becomes cluttered and your site layout becomes full of links everywhere.

I use a great free WordPress plugin to easily exclude pages from navigation. Exclude Pages creates a checkbox on the side of page creation and editing areas that allows you to exclude the page you are editing or creating from the navigation menus.

I’ve been using the plugin for over a year and it’s been kept up to date. I feel confident you will love this plugin.

 Posted by Jay at 12:23 am

Recently Popular WordPress Plugin

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Oct 292010
 

Displaying and featuring items that are recently popular on your wordpress blog is generally more useful than showing the top viewed items of all time. Recently I’ve began to swap out my “Most Viewed” widgets with “Recently Popular” lists using the Recently Popular Plugin.

You can configure this plugin to show the recently popular pages, posts, or both. The plugin allows you to easily configure how far back it should check activity to generate your list – this allows you to set the widget to display the most popular posts over the past day, week, month, year, etc.

Recently Popular is super easy to setup and display in the sidebar. The author keeps it up to date. In 3 months since my first installation it hasn’t broken down on me yet (/me knocks on wood).

 Posted by Jay at 5:18 am  Tagged with:

Related Posts WordPress Plugin Review

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Apr 212010
 

wordpress-related-postsYet Another Related Blog Posts Plugin is one of the wordpress plugins I’ve used on almost every site I’ve put together over the past 2 years. It has a variety of configuration settings that allow you to determine the relevancy requirements for related posts to be listed in an area under each blog post on the single page view.

Showing Related Blog posts helps your blog in several ways. First, it allows users to find other content relevant to what they were searching for when they first arrived at your site, and your overall bounce rate will lower. Second, it helps search engine have more visibility into your site and pages. By having related posts listed for each single post search engines begin to group the posts together under associated topic weight.

Customizable templates allow you to change every aspect of the plugin’s display. You can easily disallow certain posts or categories from showing up as related posts. It’s one of my favorites and you should give it a try.

 Posted by Jay at 12:12 pm

Contact Form 7 Pixel Tracking In Sidebar Widget

 plugins  1 Response »
Apr 202010
 

contact-form-pixelContact Form 7, a free wordpress plugin I’ve raved about for a long time (before I found cforms), has a great widget plugin that will allow you to post up lead generation forms in your blog’s sidebar.

If you decide to pay a certain amount for people who send you contacts through your website you will need to be able to fire a pixel as soon as the contact form has been successfully submitted. This is easy to do with Contact Form 7 if you’re using an image pixel.

Log into your wordpress admin area. Navigate to the Contact Form administration area in the bottom left. Click the name of the form you want to place a pixel in (if you have multiple forms setup). At the bottom of the form admin screen click the “Messages” tab.

Under the first message “# Sender’s message was sent successfully”, paste your IMG SRC image call html. Scroll to the bottom and hit save. Now submit your form and it should fire the pixel.

 Posted by Jay at 10:24 am  Tagged with: ,

Photo Gallery WordPress Plugin

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Apr 122010
 

photo-gallery-pluginAfter months of trying various photo gallery plugins for my wordpress sites it’s clear that NextGen Gallery is clearly the easiest to install and configure while offering the most options.

You can allow registered users your blog to upload photos. You can decide if you require a review process before they are posted.

You can manage your own personal photo galleries easily with this script. You can create custom albums that contain galleries of photos you’ve already grouped together. The feature list is huge on this one.

There are other NextGen Gallery companion plugins (also free) that you can download to display the latest (or random) photos in the side bar, and many other cool features. Of course NextGen has a spectacular slide show and all the normal bells and whistled you’d expect with an over the top plugin like this.

I basically install this with my core group of plugins on any new domain. If you’ve found a better free plugin, or have ran into any problems getting NextGen Gallery to work, drop me a comment in the comment box below and I’ll get back to you.

 Posted by Jay at 10:06 pm

G-Lock Double Opt-in Newsletter Plugin

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Apr 102010
 

wordpress-newsletterUse WordPress and need a free plugin to manage your newsletters subscribers? No problem. The G-Lock Double Opt-in Manager includes everything you need to collect and manage subscribers. Users must first confirm their email by clicking a unique link code sent to the email address they use to register for the newsletter. Once you’ve built a list, you can use the G-Lock interface to easily email all your subscribers at once.

Maintaining an active newsletter (or even better yet a trigger based emailing system) is one of the most effective ways to drive business for most websites. Special offers, customer incentives, and keeping your shoppers or subscribers up to date are just a few ways you can use a Newsletter to drive business.

This plugin comes with a handy widget you can place in any widgable area in your WordPress blog and immediately begin taking subscribers. Everything works straight out of the box, it couldn’t be more simple.

 Posted by admin at 9:40 am  Tagged with: , ,

Display WordPress Blogroll Categories In Widgets Using BetterBlogRoll

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Apr 082010
 

wordpress-blogrollManage your blogroll display easily with BetterBlogRoll.

I’m using it because I wanted to separate blogroll categories displayed in various widgets inside my wordpress theme. I’ve used this plugin for several years and have never had a problem with it. I hope it works well for you.

This works perfect if you’d like to group together links and display them in different areas. Sometimes I’ll include 5 forum links, 5 online store links, etc all related to whatever the site is about. You may also want to use this to group together different sets of affiliate links and put them in key widget enabled areas.

Your theme will determine how useful this plugin is. If you only have a couple widget areas, or only a sidebar widget, it may not be as useful (however I still use it on my 2 column single widgetable area sites)

 Posted by Jay at 1:27 am  Tagged with:

URL Rotator for WordPress

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Apr 032010
 

URL Rotation Plugin is the best URL Rotator I’ve found for WordPress. It allows you to setup specific jump URLs such as yourdomain.com/magneticbracelets, then specify a group of URLs to rotate for that link and evenly distribute clicks between them. If you wanted to test out 5 different landing pages for magnetic bracelets to see which one made you the most money per 100 clicks this would be a great way to do it.

Why use a URL Rotator? – To Test Landing Pages! You can buy the worst traffic on earth to test landing pages using URL Rotators. You can start shelling out for top dollar clicks on Google once you know which product pages generally convert best. Sure there are a lot of variables and traffic from different places converts differently but if you test 5 URLs and the worst one gives you 1 sale per 100 clicks and the best one gives you 5 , you’re going to probably always see much better conversions on the latter page.

 Posted by Jay at 3:47 am  Tagged with:

Block WordPress Comment Spam

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Apr 022010
 

Need a free WordPress comment spam blocking plugin but not sure which one to install? The WP-SpamFree Anti Spam WordPress Plugin will block spam and likely deter spammers from coming back.

Several friends installed this early on and reported that it caused some problems with various themes. There have been several new versions released in 2010 that should correct any problems people where having.

I’ve used this free plugin on several sites over the past 7 months and it has really been a huge time saver. It works flawlessly for me.

There are several options you can set to determine the level of security on your blog. The recommended settings should do the trick. It works right out of the box.

 Posted by Jay at 6:25 am  Tagged with:

Best Polls WordPress Plugin

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Apr 022010
 

Want to run some polls on your wordpress blog? Let me introduce you to my little friend WP Polls. This poll was written by the legendary plugin author Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. I don’t want to get too off topic here but I recently heard Lester has taken a job at some company. I can’t believe we haven’t all donated 100′s of dollars for lester’s plugins. I’m really let down with myself and I think this is a huge loss to wordpress. I am going to paypal him soon, really.

Why run polls on your website? If you run the right polls, you’re customers will tell you exactly what they are looking for, and exactly what they aren’t looking for. Let them determine how you build your site and which products you showcase. It will keep them coming back and drive up your conversions. Matching products to your customers is a science aided by polling.

I hope this doesn’t get too outdated anytime soon. A simple poll is a great way to fill up some space on a new website that’s starving for content.

 Posted by Jay at 5:42 am  Tagged with: ,
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