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Nowadays almost everyone has a WordPress powered website, but not everyone has a professional build blog. To build a professional blog you have to concentrate on few aspects. One of the most important aspects is of course the design. The design of your blog is without a dub the one who decides if your blog is going to be a successful one or not.
The design of your blog is based on the way you structure everything and the actual look. In this post I will talk only about the ways to improve your sidebar structure and make your blog more accessible to your visitors.
I will list here the most recommended WordPress plugins for your blog sidebar. You don’t have to use all of them, using all of them will create chaos in your blog and people will be annoyed. You should choose the ones you think that fits your needs and try to avoid the situation described bellow.
Is a simple yet very useful plugin for beginner bloggers. This plugin will allow you to add the classical icons for subscription: twitter, rss feed and email of course effortless.
The earnings from your website are pretty important, the most effective way of getting high profits from your website is of course by selling ad space. In order for advertisers to buy ad space, they need to see what’s your alexa rank and if they like it, they will buy ad space from your blog.
Is a wordpress plugin that displays twitter updates in a simple widget box in your sidebar. The Twitter blender also has an updates archive.
WordPress double option widget bulk email plugin for newsletter subscription will allow users to subscribe to your newsletter and also you will be able to manage the subscriptions.
As I believe you figured out, the Recent Comments by Entry plugin will display the latest comments and also the entry where they were posted.
Helps you to easily maintain your media works and place them into your blog sidebar.
WP Carousel is a plugin that create a carousel with a category’s posts, and you can put it anywhere on the sidebar or blog.
This plugin helps you to easily maintain the ads you display in your sidebar and in your blog. It was created by Primo Themes and it supports any image format and also any size and also you can add HTML/JavaScript/IFrame/etc codes.
This is a pretty cool widget plugin that allows your blog members to login. Using the ajax technologies, “Login with Ajax” will improve the aspect of your login page and also will impress all of your members.
This will display a cool who’s online widget and also you will be able to see where the user comes from by using this great geographical positioning system.
Will display your twitter updates in a simple widget who has the shape and the design of a twitter page included in a cool twitter bubble.
If the blog you own is a business one and you have to show people where they can find you, Google Map is always the best solution. Post Google Map will help you to do that effortless.
Nowadays everyone has a Flickr account and everyone wants to share their photos with friends and why not will all internet users. Simple Flikr Photos allows you to add a Flickr widget with your latest added photos.
This is definitely a must have plugin for developers and people who are offering services for free. Paypal was always the best friend of this kind of people and it helps them everyday.
Being able to collapse your archive will save you some useful space in your sidebar. Collapsing archive is the plugin you want for this, and it is based on javascript.
General stats counts almost everything from users, number of posts, days, and adds a simple widget to display this stats.
If you own multiple blogs or websites, Tag for me will help you to display your stats using their widget.
Displays the tags into a very interesting and cool way. The tags you write more are of course bigger and the ones that you don’t are smaller. The plugin is using the action script programming and is very stable.
This actually lets you to configure multiple types of sidebar and choose which one to display.
Adds cool and flash clock. This will help you to improve the design and it will make your site more dynamic. The plugin also contains over 25 different clocks.
It is a flexible and easy to use Adsense management plugin. With quick adsense you will add and maintain your adsense ads in no-time.
Includes a widget which adds multiple functions displayed in other tabs.
Add the iContact ‘Automatic Sign-up Form’ to your sidebar with this widget. Simply paste the code from the form you created in iContact into this widget. Your form will be converted into HTML (instead of Javascript, which takes more time to load).
Choose which widgets to display and which widgets to hide. You can also choose to do this on which page of your blog you want.
This plugin enables you to build “category entries” which contain a link to the category and which may contain a link to the category’s feed, an image, the time stamp of when the category was last updated, and the current count of posts in the category.
A simple ajax plugin that loads a micro feed on your sidebar.
It displays a cool flash player in your blog sidebar. You will be able to choose which MP3 file to listen and is more like the youtube player.
This obviously adds icons to your categories and pages links.
Using this plugin will allow you to easily change the current theme of your blog.
Gallery Widget is a simple plugin that let you show the latest/random images of the wordpress media gallery inside a widget, directly in your templates (it is possible to choose some categories to be included/excluded) or in posts/pages using a shortcode (see faq on how to use them).
If you liked this list of plugins just share it with your friend, and don’t forget to let us know what you think by commenting. Thank you!
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I'm an 19 years old passionate web developer. I love to blog, tweet and web design. I'm an active member of social media websites - Digg, Mixx, Reddit and StumbleUpon, and I also am the owner of Devstand .
Monday, March 19th, 2012 16:24
Most of the plugin are well know to me but Category and Page Icons seems new to me. thanks
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 10:12
Good information that I look for so far….. wushh, thankks
Sunday, February 19th, 2012 22:52
Some very cool sidebar plugins, as of now my sidebar is extremely ugly and boring, I think I will be using the tag cloud widget to add some spice to my site :)
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 22:59
Really very informative article really these all plugins are superb to design sidebar thanks for the post .cheers !
Monday, February 13th, 2012 01:31
Really useful post, thanks very much! :)
Sunday, February 5th, 2012 08:50
Very useful , I was just searching for it . I think i should use some of them . Hope it will be helpful for my blog Itechcrazy
Sunday, January 8th, 2012 11:40
Good work,Nice information…
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 01:57
nice collection of plugins..
i have been searching for some of this plugins :)
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 11:37
I have seen a lot of wordpress blogs. Yours is just an excellently designed one. While, i have read about a lot of plugins earlier also. I didn’t thought about AJAX powered login link in the sidebar; it is good for bloggers having a lot of people guest blogging for them. Thanks for sharing this wonderful post.
Monday, December 5th, 2011 20:49
Interesting… :D I like the Twitter plugin. Twitter is a growing social network and plugins for it are helpful. :D
Monday, October 3rd, 2011 16:29
Superb list you have here! these plugins will make my blogs more beautiful! thanks a bunch!
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 16:30
One of the better sidebar lists I’ve come across, thanks for posting.
Friday, August 5th, 2011 18:27
very nice plugins really coniderable
Sunday, July 31st, 2011 19:48
I really liked this post, hope to see more great work like this.
Monday, April 25th, 2011 17:41
The twitter bubble didn’t look anything like what you displayed here, on my site. Am I doing something wrong, the widget was like cut in half almost.
Saturday, March 26th, 2011 10:06
Nice list ! I was actually looking for some Plugin for Collapsing Blogroll !
I liked that Sidebar Tabs, will be using on my blog.
Thursday, February 24th, 2011 14:30
Great selection of plugins ! I use some of them but AJAX Login really made my day ! This is going into my Bookmarks :)
Saturday, February 5th, 2011 11:43
Awesome list of plug-ins, that improves the look and feel of your wordpress website or blog. thanks for sharing with us.
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 13:15
Nice useful list. Would be cool with an updated version on this post. There are a lot of new great plugins out there.
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 07:29
I like the theme switch plugin. I hope it will really relieve the pains of adding your blog content to a new theme
Saturday, February 20th, 2010 18:37
Great article! I was looking for a Twitter Bubble plugin for WordPress. Couldn’t find any decent examples. I stumbled across this page via Google and there are more useful plugins on this page. I think Im gonna use the Tiny Feed plugin as well!
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tyrone
Monday, October 5th, 2009 13:00
excellent selection of wordpress tools, will be using some of these on my blogs
Matty
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 19:38
That was very useful, thanks. Some plugins I never new were possible, that were exactly what I didn’t know I needed, but do now.
baagdi
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 13:23
really this is very useful. we are web designer we know.
tim
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 22:50
This was a strange thing to say…
“Nowadays almost everyone has a WordPress powered website…”
There are millions and millions of people that do not have WordPress powered websites.
kat
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 15:20
Thanks for this! I just opened my website and this really helps me to develop my blog.
rainer
Friday, November 27th, 2009 12:20
Great ! That was very useful, thanks.
shoaib
Thursday, January 14th, 2010 18:27
man u r rocking ,you are gonna blow of my head with these huge list of wp plugins.
think m gonna visit this blog more often
thnx again.
herupermana
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 18:18
Amazing Post, Thanks for sharring
Arfandia
Thursday, January 21st, 2010 12:50
Nice article, I love all the plugins that you mentioned.
André Loibl
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 17:54
wow… what an awesome collection of useful plugins! :-) Thank you very much for putting this together! Sidebar tabs is beautiful – I’ll have to find a way to put that into my theme! :-)
Many grretings and thanks again! :-)
André
Philip Downer
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 18:55
Two of the most powerful sidebar plugins that I’ve come across recently are the QueryPosts plugin and the WidgetLogic plugin.
QueryPosts allows you to visually select from all of the different parameters that WordPress’ query_posts function provides and display the results in a widget.
WidgetLogic allows you to make conditional statements about a widget to determine if it will display on a specific section of your website.
Andy Fitzpatrick
Monday, October 19th, 2009 17:20
Thanks for a genuinely useful list of plugins. Just having a play with some on out page now.
Humidifier
Sunday, January 17th, 2010 23:05
The quick adsense plugin is my favorite one. It is so much better and easy to use with it.
-Kai
Matt
Monday, October 5th, 2009 17:14
A lot of plugins I haven’t seen before, and I thought I’d seen them all.
David Thomas
Monday, October 5th, 2009 16:37
Thanks for the well researched and useful plugin list!!
Found you through Twitter.
Philip Ze
Monday, October 5th, 2009 16:23
Hi, thanks for adding my Quick Adsense plugin into the list. This is a nice collection, I would definitely try some of the plugins.
Matthew Stephens
Monday, October 5th, 2009 22:32
I use TinyFeed on all of my websites. It’s also a great way to leverage my OneSpot feeds.
Gopal Raju
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 00:03
Thanks for sharing this list!
Diane
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 06:41
What a completely useful list. I’ll be implementing some to improve my sidebar. Thank you.
Thomas
Thursday, October 8th, 2009 12:53
Nice List, some of them are really great but some other are really crap (who need a Flash clock ?)
BunnygotBlog
Thursday, October 8th, 2009 11:05
This is a fantastic list! Thanks for putting it together.
Kari
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 21:19
These are excellent tools. I can see why they would come in handy.
Paul Olyslager
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 11:27
Nice collection indeed! Does someone have any experience with the paypal donations plugin?
Matt Dunlap
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 21:14
I’m pretty sure there is someone out there that has added all 30 to their sidebar… if so, please comment here so I can see it!! It would be funny