Analytics:

• Analytics 360 A plugin from MailChimp, this plugin integrates your Google Analytics dashboard with your blogging and e-newsletter data, so that you can see what your traffic is doing when you are posting.
• WassUp I might be a control freak, but the instantaneous nature of this plugin lets me see who is on my site now and what they are looking at. It creates large databases, so my advice is to have it reset itself either once a week or every 24 hours.

SEO:

• All in one SEO Pack This is the absolute standard in SEO plugins. It allows the generation of separate meta information for each page. A definite must have.
• Google XML sitemaps If you know about SEO, then you know search engines like sitemaps. This plugin generates and submits them to major search engines for you.
• Simple Tags Edit and add tags to your posts easily with this plugin. Tags allow visitors and social media sites to classify your posts and information readily.
• Robots.txt Tell search engines where they can and cannot crawl. This is an important file that many people forget about, but this plugin will help you through that.

Posting:

• After the Deadline A fantastic grammar and spell checker for WordPress.
• Flickr Photo Album Use this plugin to insert pictures from your Flickr photostream right in your posts.
• Bad Behavior This plugin has saved me so much time and energy. It is better than askimet or any other anti-spam method. It holds anything it thinks might be spam, doesn’t allow known spammers to post at all. This is by far the best plugin I have ever installed.

Other stuff you should have:

• Socialize This This social media plugin allows you to not only append social book marking icons to your posts, but it also allows you to change the icon set easily from within WordPress.
• SyntaxHighlighterEvolved (Use with visual code editor below for even easier editing) With several built in styles for code editing, this syntax highlighter was the only one that didn’t break the styling on my blog.
• Visual Code Editor This plugin allows you to post your code right into the visual editor in WordPress.
• WP 125×125 A basic 125×125 ad manager that is a widget, so you don’t have to manually add in your little ads anymore.

(header image credit : Vinay Deep)

Why not? Because at a certain point the amount of extra plugins and customizations outweighs the ease of use.  For the trade show display company, I am going to use SilverStripe because of its similar ease of use.  That particular CMS has a simple to administer back-end that was designed for the type of site I am building.

When is WordPress the answer?

• When you are building a site whose main function is to be a blog (like this one).
• When you are building a site who has a manageable number of pages.
• When you are adding e-commerce functionality to a small site (whether it is WordPress or just static)

When should you consider other options?

• When you are building a complex site where page relationships are less straight forward.
• When the main purpose of your site is to sell retail items.
• When you need to have modules repeat on different pages.
• When you need some of the functionality that you can build into WordPress be native.

I would say 80% of our projects use WordPress over at Purple Crayon Web Studio, but it doesn’t work for everything.  The moral of the story? Look at all the options before you make the decision to avoid getting halfway through a project and realize just how much customization it is going to take.

(image credit Marjan Krebelj)