WordPress has become a increasingly popular method to create a website due to its ease of use, fantastic and helpful developer community, and the sheer number of high-quality free modules and plug-ins that can add fantastic features and security to your website. Here is list of the seven I recommend everyone start with.
Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is a spam filter plugin for comments. It is automatically
installed with WordPress, so you simply need to go to your WP-Admin
Dashboard and click on Plugins, find Akismet in the list and click Activate.
A message will appear asking for your WordPress.com API key, simply
click the link and create a WordPress.com account and then copy and
paste the key back into your Dashboard.
Quick Cache
When a page is accessed on your site, WordPress performs some
database lookups and executes a bunch of code. Ordinarily this isn’t a
problem, however if you happen to have a lot of traffic all at once,
this can slow your site right down. Quick Cache is a plugin that caches
your pages periodically to dramatically reduce the load on the WordPress
server. You can find the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/
Once installed, click on Plugins in the Dashboard and click Activate.
You then need to click on Options in the dashboard menu and find
WP-Cache in the menu. This leads you to a page where you can enable the
caching. Don’t enable just yet, because it’s best to do this after you
install your theme and have everything working, otherwise you can
sometimes have trouble testing changes.
Note that to get WP-Cache working you may need to create some
directories for it to write to. The plugin will give you details of what
to do.
Widgets are becoming more and more popular as a means to import information from other sites and display it on your own. Most of them are fairly simple to add to your website (usually a JavaScript or an iFrame) and they can give your website added value and help increase traffic. Did I mention most of them are FREE?
Some popular uses of widgets include:
Facebook Widget
These widgets let you add a small feed of your Facebook timeline to your website. It helps to let people know that you also have a presence on Facebook and that your Region’s volunteers and parents are engaging there as well. The Facebook Activity widget can be found here.
Twitter Widget
Similar to the Facebook widget, this app allows you to display your Twitter feed on your website. It will let people see some of your tweets and prompts them to connect with you on Twitter for more info. Here’s a popular Twitter widget you can add to your homepage.
We recently debuted a news widget for use on AYSO Region websites. It’s fairly simple to use and comes in three different sizes to complement a variety of website layouts.
The widget is programmed in JavaScript, but doesn’t need to be placed in the page’s header tag. Simply copy the JavaScript tag and place it wherever you want it to show up on your website. If you want to have text wrap around the widget, you can place it in a DIV tag and float it in the text. Below is an example of how you would do that:
Code: <div style=”float: right;”><script type="text/javascript" src="http://marketing.ayso.org/js/aysonewswidget200.js"></script></div>
The DIV tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document and is used to group element, and then formats them with CSS.
To add the news widget to your website, visit the Region Toolkit.
For more information about how a DIV tag works, visit the W3C Schools website. They have great information on all things HTML/CSS.
