The beauty about WordPress is its customisation and robust framework makes it the ultimate publishing platform.

The popularity of WordPress is mainly down to the plugins which can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. I’ve used a number of plugins on WordPress websites I have built and thought I’d list some of my favourites or most commonly used.

Flickr has become a massive viral marketing tool and I’m currently building a new part of my own personal site which will show my Flickr images which are my doodles and sketchs for web designs and show my thought & design process of how the final web design and web site was built from the original creative ideas. A great plugin in for WordPress is the Flickr Photo Album

Typography is a major issue with the web as we as web designers are limited in using certain web safe fonts such as Arial, Tahoma or Verdana. Services such as TypeKit are good at getting custom fonts with the @font-face but that service costs a lot of money. Cufon is a WordPress plugin which doesn’t use the @font-face. It draws the font using JavaScript. Now I can use nice typography and font in all my WordPress designs.

The main issue I had with WordPress is that I felt it wasn’t like a real content management system because you had to create custom fields if you want to display more data. I wanted to have the facility to add my own field types. Well with Flutter I can add my own new fields of any type. Being a feature rich WordPress content management plugin allowing for custom file uploads, image uploads and more. Flutter also features image manipulation such as automatic resizing & cropping.

I would be really interested to hear anyone else who is using any of these plugins and their thoughts? I’ll look at other favourite plugins for WordPress in my next blog entry.

Martin Sandhu is a Nottingham web designer from the UK & a member of the Nottingham web design community specialising in digital marketing. If you require assistance with WordPress why not contact on 0871 705 7000 or use the contact form.