Plugins add that extra functionality that makes your blog more interesting, more manageable, or more like a website.

One of the main problems I faced is the over-abundance of choice: there are so many plugins to choose from.

In the interest of time, I decided to limit the number of plugins to just the essentials, so here were my top priorities:

1. Akismet stops all those nasty spammers leaving garbage comments on your blog. Spam on your blog is a serious problem, and is an excellent tool for killing spam dead.

2. All in One SEO Pack applies best practice SEO principles to your website automatically: title tags, description tags, and also takes care of duplicate content issues.

3. Google Analyticator integrates the free but powerful Google Analytics into your blog.

4. Sociable inserts those little social bookmarking links at the bottom of your postings. These bookmarks act as little votes for your content, or more importantly as inbound links. You can configure which social bookmarking services you want to offer.

5. Google Sitemap Generator forms part of your SEO strategy; a sitemap tells Google how to crawl your site, and where the content can be found.

6. Enhanced Contact Form is a very simple contact form that incorporates spam protection, as well as giving you giving the referring page on your site, or if the original referrer is a search engine, the keywords used in the query.

I risk turning into a “plugins addict” - there’s always just one more cool thing to add…

The lesson learnt: your time is money, so keep an eye on your return on investment!

Examples of plugins include sitemap generators, spam checkers, contact forms, and more.  You can find literally hundreds of different plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Be sure to read WordPress’ Guide to Managing Plugins but purely as an aide memoire to myself:

1. Download the plugins, unzip them, create a folder with the exactly right plugin folder name in wp-content/plugins and then FTP the files into it.

2.  Go to your Plugins menu choice, and then Activate the Plugin

3.  Go to the Options menu to make any necessary modifications to the Plugin.

Remember to check that the Plugins are compatible with the verison of WordPress your running.

There are so many WordPress themes to choose from, and I wasted an disproportionate amount of my4 hours just wallowing in the abundance of designs:

WordPress Theme Viewer

The beauty of WordPress is you can apply a new design at any time, and your content will be reformatted to the new look and feel.

You will need to put together your own list of requirements for your design, but mine were:

1. I wanted a theme that looked fairly “corporate”

2. I wanted to incorporate alot of widgets like Google AdSense and Social bookmarking

3. I wanted to be able to amend the design in terms of the use of colours, my own graphics

In the end I decided to experiment with Copyblogger theme but of course, I can always change my mind later!