OK well I'm about to have a custom WordPress design made for my new blog, but I have never really run a blog before so I'm starting to look around the web for great ideas/plugins/features to integrate into a blog design. So I was just wondering if anyone has some highly recommend design setups or some MUST HAVE plugins that give someones blog the edge in viral marketing, SEO, adsense/monetisation etc. I'm really looking to attack this design from all angles. So if you were getting a custom design do - what would you include or how would you design it? Thanks in advance.
Are you designing it yourself or is someone else doing it for you? If you're doing it yourself, make sure you have Firefox and the Web Developer extention. I'm not an expert in designing or coding, but I couldn't live without that when I redesigned my last blog. You'll want the adsense deluxe plugin so all you have to do is enter <!--adsense--> in your posts whenever you want the ads inserted... You'll probably also want the 'related posts' and 'most popular posts' plugins once you get a fair big of content, just to increase your pageviews... Let's see, what else...definitely Akismet to block spam. This post is starting to sound just like this one actually.
I'm getting someone else to design it. Those are some good suggestions - I particularly like the idea of the related posts - please keep them coming.
So no one else has any ideas of the things they'd want to integrate if they were getting a custom designed template?