Plugins We Use
You can quickly do in a day what could have taken a week or more. The learning curve involved in HTML and now HTML5 – is significant, but with WordPress, it has been lessened. As with all tools you use to create websites, Dreamweaver was by far the most popular. Unfortunately, Dreamweaver was very expensive. Couple $$$ and learning and people used a basic website builder, for a very basic price, and you had a very basic website.
Enter the world of WordPress! YAY!
With WordPress there is a learning curve to it, but the biggest advantage is styling the pages of your site. That is where css comes in. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. They give web pages that really clean look that everyone loves. That is also where Plugins come it at. It helps a great deal to download these plugins and a lot of them are free, but the truly great ones will cost a little bit, but you get to keep them forever.
Divi Booster (Affiliate Disclosure)
The first one is Divi Booster. It does exactly what it says. It really gives a boost to your css code. Sure you still have to know how to use CSS in other instances, but this plugin helps a lot. Here is the link so you can see what it does.
We don’t offer a lot of links but the plugins and other items we like.
TinyMCE Advanced
You just can’t live without this one. This is such a great plugin. It allows you to style text. To give it H1 -H6 head tags quickly, add a horizontal rule with the click of the mouse as shown above. Underline text (this was standard with WP a couple of years ago, but for some reason they took it away), and so many other things. So do yourself a favor and download that one. It’s free!
WP Media Folder (Affiliate Disclosure)
Now the next plugin we will talk about is Media Folders. Ug. They can get so big since it is all in a single folder. But, there is a plugin you can use that allows you to create new folders. Imagine if you have a photography website. Let’s say you have pictures of birds, weddings, children, animals, what have you. Now you could put all those into a single folder, but that is not feasible when you need these to be separated. If you want to add a gallery, well that just triples the time and effort you take because everything is everywhere.
WordFence
This is a security program. You have to have security set into place when you have a website that offers e-commerce. Like it or not, there are some people who prey on hacking into other well meaning sites, to try to phish, or send erroneous emails to unsuspecting people, sometimes disguised as you. This and other programs are not an end all, but it helps.
You may be thinking, well, if that is the case I would rather just go with a standard HTML5 site then…NOT SO FAST! Those also get hacked into, you just don’t know about it until it’s too late. Usually with WordPress, if you have WordFence in place it will let you know something is happening.