Advanced Twitter Widget
Some WordPress themes come with a Twitter widget built in, but if yours doesn’t then Advanced Twitter Widget is a simple plugin that lets you add your tweets to your site. (And while it’s true you can use Twitter’s own widgets, I prefer to style the tweets to better match the site’s style.)

Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a simple but useful contact form. Lets you easily create multiple custom forms and send to various email addresses.

Exclude Pages
Exclude Pages lets you create public pages that don’t appear in the navigation. This is useful for public pages you’d like to remain hidden, landing pages you don’t want to appear in your site’s navigation, client pages, and for themes that don’t allow you to use custom menus.

Lightbox 2
Lightbox 2 automatically makes any linked image display in a lightbox-style popover, rather than just open the image in a browser window.

Widget Logic
This is one of the most useful WordPress plugins, and it gives you a lot of control over how sidebar widgets appear on your site. While many WordPress themes allow for different sidebar content for various pages, some have a single sidebar for all pages. And even for those themes with multiple sidebars, you might want more control over what widgets appear on specific pages. Widget Logic lets you control exactly what widget appears on what page. That sounds vague, but once you learn how the conditions are written it’s powerful and easy to have widgets appear exactly where you want them.

WP-DB-Backup
It’s always a good idea to make backups. WP-DB-Backup makes backups of your MySQL database and saves, emails or downloads it. You can also schedule automated backups to be sent to an email address.

WP Super Cache
John Gruber is infamous for trashing WordPress sites he links to: often such sites are overwhelmed with traffic, and WordPress can’t handle high levels of traffic very well. Enter WP Super Cache: this plugin creates cached versions of your site’s pages instead of having to hit the database each time a page is accessed. If you expect a lot of site traffic, WP Super Cache is a must-have.

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Another no-brainer plugin. WordPress SEO gives you control over page titles, descriptions, and keywords on a per-page basis. A nice feature is the “Google result preview” that shows how the page would appear in Google based on your current settings. Also, WordPress SEO generates a Google sitemap XML file as well (which eliminated the need for a no-longer-must-have plugin, Google XML Sitemaps).

I’ve looked at many different content management systems (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, TextPattern, to name a few). One thing they had in common was very powerful and customizable templates. Unfortunately, this also resulted in more complex administrative tools. These small business owners want to spend their time actually running their business, not learning a new application to manage their website…and then sometimes re-learning it when they want to update their site weeks or months later.

The Quick.CMS admin tool makes it extremely easy for people to edit and update their site. It’s not the most powerful CMS platform, but it gives site owners the control they need. I’ve trained clients on the Quick.CMS admin tool in less than 30 minutes, after which they were already editing and adding new pages.

However, one of my complaints about Quick.CMS is the lack of polish. The default template isn’t very good and the add-on templates aren’t much better. Luckily it’s highly (if not easily) customizable, so with some work I’ve been able to change it to do what I need from a layout and design standpoint. The administrative tool UI is also very basic-looking — nothing flashy or fancy at all, perhaps a little dated. However, my clients who have used it have been satisfied with it…and they’re more concerned with how their customer-facing site looks more than then admin tool behind it.

You can download and try Quick.CMS from their site, or contact me about getting your own site designed.

If you’re an artist in need of a custom website, please contact me.

Luckily, the fix turned out to be an easy one (I needed to re-upload my custom template files, which were deleted with the upgrade). But from now on I’ll proceed with caution before clicking any automatic “update” link.

Rather than start from scratch, I did some research and decided to use the Thematic Theme Framework, a simple but easy-to-customize WordPress template. I still had to do a bunch of custom PHP work and there’s too much unnecessary code under the hood, but overall I’m happy with the result. Thematic let me get up and running relatively quickly, and so far I’ve been satisfied with WordPress.

The other bit of learning was with the NextGEN Gallery plug-in. It’s a very powerful and easily customized photo gallery plug-in for WordPress, and I’m using it to display the portfolio images on the site. Finally, I used Header Image Rotator Pro for the main image on the home page.

Eventually I’ll get the templates and code cleaned up the way I like it, but for now I’m happy to have a site that easy to update.