Nonprofit web design

WordPress is a great product, which is why it’s installed behind most of the websites I design, but it doesn’t do everything out of the box. Fortunately there is a way to change and add new functionality to the basic CMS, and that’s by installing plugins. So which plugins do I install most often?

• Theme Test Drive – allows you to test a new theme whilst your visitors still see the current one.
• Maintenance Mode – take your website offline and display a message instead.
• WordPress Database Backup – because most people forget to backup their website’s data. This plugin can do one-off backups but better still, you can schedule a daily or weekly backup to be sent to you by email.
• Google XML sitemap – invaluable because it automatically informs the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines about changes to your site content.
• Akismet – essential because it prevents your site being deluged with spam.
• Search Everything – improves the way your search form works.
• Multi Level Navigation Menu – an easy way to create a great-looking drop-down menu
• Login Lockdown – detects repeated fails to login to your website correctly, and bars further attempts for a set time period.
• WordPress Secure – hides the WordPress version number from visitors and makes it slightly more difficult to hack.
• Bad Behavior – prevents spambots visiting your website.
• SEO Slugs – removes short unnecessary words like on, it, a, the from your site’s URLs.

Here are some other plugins that I’ve found useful occasionally:

• Stray Random Quotes – very useful for when you want to put quotes from people in your website. Despite the name you don’t have to display them randomly and this is a great way to create a testimonials page.
• Shopp – an inexpensive e-commerce plugin, see it in action on the ARISE website.
• Constant Contact Widget and MailChimp Plugin – if your organisation has an email newsletter, you should put its signup form on your website. Whichever bulk email online application you use, there may be a WordPress plugin for it.

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