Showing posts with label wordpress widgets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wordpress widgets. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Top Notch WordPress Footer Designs (Best Practices & Tips)

Most footer designs are boring and the reason behind it is because Footer designs are often ignored. Users do not realize that footer designs are just as important as the rest of the design. Footers are more than just a place to put copyright information. There are endless benefits of allocating your footer space, and it can be used for your advantage. In this article we will display a collection of top notch WordPress footer designs and share why some of these designs qualify to be in our list. We will also share some tips and snippets that you can use to improve your footer design and use it to your advantage.

Collection of Best WordPress Footer Designs
Below is the list of the best WordPress footer designs that we found across the web. We probably have missed a lot others. If you know a footer design on a WordPress powered site that you think will be worthy to be mentioned at WPBeginner please share it with us in the comments.

1. David Hellmann



5. Torrance Web Design


6. Carsonified


8. John Cow


9. Branded07






11. Wire Roses





15. Mr. Diggles



17. Starseite




19. Colorburned


20. Iemai


What to add on a footer design?
As you can see in the showcase above, your possibilities are limited by your imagination. Some of the features site displayed in our showcase have:

Contact form
Author’s Biography
Author’s sites
Resources
Search Area
Tag cloud
Archives
Recent Posts
Sponsors
RSS Subscribe Reminder
Social Media Profiles
Calendar
Reader showcase
Featured/Popular posts

Now these should be not the limit to your footer. You do not need to have all of these elements in your footer. Although it would be a test of your creativity if you can put them all in and make it look good.

One thing you should keep in mind when reorganizing your footer is that you want to make it look good and clean. The more organized your footer is, the better it is to go through by your users. You can go to great deal of customizations for your footer design in WordPress, as far as making your entire footer widget-compatible.

Below we will provide you with snippets or other options that you can use to add all the features that we listed from the top notch WordPress Footer Designs. Note: That most of these jobs will require knowledge of HTML and CSS. If you don’t have that knowledge this is the end of post for you.

Contact Form

Adding a contact form is possible with the cforms plugin. Simply download/activate the plugin and modify the settings to your need. Once you have the settings set up, you will need to paste the code provided by the plugin in your footer.php. Make sure to style it and make it fit with your design.

Author’s Biography

You can simply edit footer.php and add the text in the codes, or you can actually use the author’s description feature from WordPress and display your author biography. This will only work if it is a one man blog. When editing your profile under the Users Tab in WordPress admin area, you have a field that says Biography. You can write the text there and instead of typing the text out in the .php file just add this snippet:



Replace the number 1 with the user id.

External Links

This will include resources, social media profiles, or author links. You can either insert the links manually in your footer.php and add and remove the link each time by modifying your php file, or you can simply use the links category feature in WordPress and modify links via admin panel. First you need to create a blogroll category named resources, and add all resource links there. The name of the category does not really matter, but be sure to add only the links you want to be placed in the footer there.

Add the following code where you want to place it:



Tag Cloud

To display tag cloud, use the following snippet:



Display Recent Posts



Thursday, August 13, 2009

WP Lytebox | Free wp plugins

WP Lytebox lets you easily add a lightbox effect when clicking a thumbnail to display the fullsize image.

Download

Review by Matteo Ionescu


qTranslate | free wp plugins


Multilingual support is one of the biggest missing features of WordPress, but with qTransalate you can easily accomplish the task of managing different languages for your blog site.

Download

Review by Daniele Bazzano



OIO Publisher | Free wp plugins

OIO Publisher is the ultimate ad management plugin. It’s great for those who want to sell ads on their blog by themselves. The great thing about OIO is that it removes all the hassle one gets from self-selling ad space: you only have to approve purchases. OIO Publisher handles everything else. Using OIO, you can sell reviews, links, ads, and even your own products! Heck, it even allows you to create your own affiliate program, so other people can sell your ads and products for you.

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry


WordPress Database Backup | Free wp plugins


You should always backup your WordPress database regularly. However, doing it manually every time can be difficult and time consuming. The WordPress Database Backup plugin lets you easily backup your WordPress database tables. You can even schedule a backup, and it'll email the file to you every day!

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry



Samsarin PHP Widget | Free wp plugins

Very simple but effective way to add custom widgets into sidebars with your PHP / HTML code. Samsarin PHP Widget functionality should be really implemented in WordPress itself!

Download

Review by Matteo Ionescu


Embedit | Free wp plugins


Embedit is a very light plugin (ionly 10 lines of code) which lets you easily embed any HTML code into a WordPress page / post. Works seamlessly across different versions of WordPress.


Review by Daniele Bazzano



Contact Form 7 | free wp plugins

Even though there are tens of contact form plugins out there, I’ve always liked Contact Form 7. The problem with most contact form plugins is that either they are too simple or way too complex. Contact Form 7, on the other hand, is extensible yet easy-to-use. It supports Ajax-powered submitting, multiple forms, CAPTCHAS, and Akismet spam filtering.

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry


SRG Clean Archives | free wp plugins


The SRG Clean Archives plugin displays your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion, that’s search engine and user-friendly, on a dedicated page or in your sidebar. If you’re still manually updating your archives page, stop doing it!

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry



TweetBacks | free wp plugins

TweetBacks allows you to search the popular microblogging service Twitter for tweets that link to your blog posts. These tweets are then displayed under the entries on your blog site so that you and your readers know how many people shared your thoughts.

Download

Review by Daniele Bazzano


Yet Another Related Posts Plugin | wp free plugins

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) inserts a list of related posts below each post on your blog, and in your blog’s RSS feed. It’s extremely configurable, and a must-have.

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry



Google XML Sitemaps Generator | Free wordpress Plugins

The Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin generates an XML sitemap of your WordPress blog. Ask, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN support this format. Having an XML sitemap and submitting it to the search engines that support it can really increase your blog’s search engine visibility, especially when it’s new.

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry



SEO : All-in-One SEO Pack : free wp plugins

The All-in-One SEO Pack is the ultimate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugin out there. It automatically optimizes your blog for search engines, and has several options for the more advanced users.

Download

Review by Ruchir Chawdhry


Sociable | Free wp plugins


Sociable automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages, and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.



Wednesday, August 12, 2009

AnswerLinks | Free wp Plugins

This plugin will auto-suggest links to definitions on Answers.com for words in your blog posts. This was created as a Crowd Favorite project for Answers.com.

WP Grins | free wp plugins


This plugin allows you to put clickable smilies on your post and comments forms. Can’t remember the right syntax for one of the smilies? Just click on it and it will be inserted right into your post/comment.


WP Unformatted

This allows you to add custom fields to a post to disable auto-formatting and/or auto-smart-quote conversion on a per-post basis.

404 Notifier | free wp plugins


This plugin logs 404 hits on your WordPress powered site and will notify you of them via e-mail or in an RSS feed.


Old Post Alert | free wp plugins

This plugin shows a “this is old” banner in the comments form when a post is more than a month old. It may help cut down on irrelevant comments on old posts.

Comment License | free wp plugins

This plugin shows a license with terms of your choosing in your comments form. You can edit the terms of your license in the options page.