Some plugins, however, that you simply can’t live without. They help you improve your SEO score, keep up-to-date stats of your visitors, and much more. While these aren’t in any particular order we can assure you that you’ll find them extremely helpful.

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Post is a plugin that automatically plugs similar entries you’ve created into your post. How does this help you? It allows you to keep your visitors around longer which, in turn, can improve traffic and even ad revenue and usually shows them you have more to offer on the subject they’ve came to your site to read about.

2. WP Super Cache

If you haven’t heard of WP Super Cache, what rock have you been living under? The benefits of this plugin are apparent usually within a day of having it installed. How does it benefit you? It lowers load times on your server (be it shared or dedicated) so there is less strain on your blog and server by creating static HTML pages of your entire blog. Then when visitors come to your site, it displays your HTML pages up instead of processing PHP and MySQL. How it benefits your visitors? Faster page loads, and what visitor wouldn’t love that?

3. Akismet

Akismet comes standard with all WordPress blogs. Use it and consider your spam troubles history. It runs various tests whenever you receive a new trackback, comment, or ping to see if it should be allowed in your blog. No blacklisting or work is needed from you once you’ve activated it and put your API Key into the system. The key can be obtained at WordPress.com by registering.

4. Feedburner

Replace your old RSS feeds with this amazing system. Your feeds get redirected to Feedburner and in return Feedburner gives you amazing stats on your subscribers. From what post they read, where they came from, and so much more.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last several years, Google is the top search engine out there. Sitemaps makes crawlers, those pesky little things going all over your blog, able to retrieve the data they need to update their pages about your site. It supports custom URLs and it even notifies all major search engines when you’ve made updates.

6. AddThis

AddThis is an amazing Social Bookmarking tool that allows your visitors to share the things they find most interesting on your site with the world. It supports all the major Social Bookmarking websites and dozens you’ve probably never even heard of. It has several options to let you adjust their button to match the look and feel of your theme.

7. OnlyWire

OnlyWire is one of those secret “tools of the trade” so many people don’t want you to find out about. Imagine a website where you can input login information to dozens of Social Bookmarking and Social Media websites then have new updates you make be automatically posted to them through the use of a WordPress plugin. Sounds to good to be true, right? Think again! OnlyWire offers free and paid services and is a true one stop spot to obtaining traffic, ranking, and so much more.

8. WP-Polls

There are any number of bloated poll plugins for WordPress. Many that add unnecessary graphics, text, and links to polls you’ve added when all you really want is a simple and easy to use feature to offer your visitors. WP-Polls is the answer to your prayers! Lightweight, customizable, and as easy, WP-Polls gives you what you want and leaves out what you don’t need.

9. SpamShiv Lite

SpamShiv Lite, being the free version, converts email addresses you input to your blog into an unrecognizable code for crawlers going around the Internet looking for addresses to add to their spam list. This plugin protects not only your email address, but any that is added to your blog from spam. A must have, some might say.

10. All in One SEO Pack

Words cannot describe what this plugin can truly offer. It allows you to control every aspect of SEO for your blog, internally, with several small extras. One extra being the use of “tags” as meta keywords in single entries. It would take a whole page to write about all the features and benefits All in One SEO Pack has to offer but until you try it for yourself, you’ll never really understand.

11. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 isn’t just a simple contact form, it’s a contact form which offers multiple form creations (depending your various needs), customization of exactly what you want, and an easy to use admin interface. Create any number of forms for your users to contact you and have those messages sent to any email address you require. Oh and it supports AJAX, CAPTCHA, and Spam Filtering.

12. Honorable Mention: Exec-PHP

Exec-PHP may not be something that you find yourself needing often but when you do it can be a life saver. It allows you to run PHP script within entries and pages.

While you may find only a few of these plugins useful for your needs, they are all truly amazing. They help increase usability and options you can offer your readers and even yourself. Best of all, they’re free!

So what’s changed with WordPress 3.0? For starters, they’ve created a new default theme, Twenty Ten. It proves to be much more robust and eye pleasing than the previous default theme, Kubrick.

In addition, the interface is lighter and has over 1,200 bugs fixes and enhancements. That’s only the beginning of the myriad new features. Creating a custom theme for WordPress is now easier than ever before thanks to new API integrations. Customized backgrounds, menus, headings, and more are now simpler to implement in new designs.

Another notable feature is the ability to perform bulk updates with the internal upgrading system. You can upgrade 15 plugins at once!

Probably the most significant change is the integration of WordPress MU (multi-user). WordPress 3.0 offers the multi-user system built directly into its structure. You can now run millions of blogs from one dashboard. Some of our notable customers are already taking advantage of this functionality.

You can learn more about new features and changes, including an exceptional video about the latest and greatest WordPress 3.0 by clicking here.

We highly recommend you upgrade immediately or contact us for further assistance.

The merge! WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.

The new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.

Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up.

Bulk Plugin and Theme Upgrades.

Shortlinks API.

If you are planning to upgrade as soon as it comes out then be sure to make a backup first, just in case things don’t go the way you anticipated. For popular or business blogs it’s recommended to first make a development environment and test it there before upgrading your live blogs!

Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

I’m writing this post on my BlackBerry Tour. The application is really easy to use, it is packed with features and looks great!

I highly recommend this to any WordPress user that has a BlackBerry phone (iPhone version is also available). It is becoming more clear that WordPress is years ahead of its competition.

You can download this application from BlackBerry World App site by searching for the keyword: wordpress.

Happy Mobile Blogging!