If you're an attorney using WordPress for your website or blog, which by the way, I recommend, you will need to consider which plugins make sense for you. At the time of posting, the WordPress Plugin directory holds 15,481 PLUGINS which, while providing extensive additional functionality to wordpress, can also be very overwhelming. Here are just a handful of plugins for wordpress that I usually recommend to attorneys.
If you use wordpress, Joost de Valk is a name with which you should quickly become familiar. Joost, or Yoast, provides awesome information and a variety of plugins for tweaking wordpress. Further, if there's plugin functionality that you want and can't find, Yoast might be your man for custom wordpress plugin development. I personally recommend trying:
Translating your offline professional reputation on the web is really what Internet for attorneys is all about. As the web evolves to embrace HTML 5 and rich web content, online author-lawyers will have additional opportunities for competitive advantages. One of these is implementing authorship markup on sites for which you contribute content.
By default, the current version of wordpress (Version 3.2.1) strips HTML elements from the user profile. Weasel's HTML Bios plugin:
simply stops wordpress from stripping HTML from the User Bio field. This is handy for anybody that actually uses those User Bios.
Which allows authors to user their wordpress user profile for authorship markup.
Sharebar
Whether your blog has success online will ultimately come down to the quality of the content you publish and how/if it is consumed, linked to, and shared. Social sharing plugins like sharebar provide you with a quick and easy way to implement sharing tools on your posts.
Sharebar preset with the major sharing networks and also allows you to add additional networks and custom buttons. What I like about sharebar the most is that it travels down the side of your posts as your visitors scroll down. This works as a friendly reminder to readers as they read your content.
WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin
The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin:
This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url.
This is another plugin that will help connect and engage your blog visitors with your social communities.
Generally speaking, you don't want to go plugin install crazy. Some plugins can do things to your website that slow it down or negatively impact user experience in a variety of ways. Also, always be sure to back up your database before testing any new plugin. Some unstable plugins or version incompatibility issues can crash your database rendering it unreadable. In fact, whether you're installing a new plugin or not, you should schedule regular backups of your wordpress database and site files. And you guessed it, there are a variety of plugins for backups too.
Ok, so what plugins have I missed?
We developed a plugin. Its not free, but it is essentially a client login area that stores all of the clients information. ' Client Intake Plugin. ' Robust, easy to use and install.
A directory is always a popular one for attorneys. We build at least 2 a month customized for attorneys in thier local areas. This builds not only SEO, but a lot of traffic.
We tend to use DirectoryPress a lot. ( http://directorypress.net )
http://Mailchimp.com , for email marketing, you can't beat them, you get 2000 members for free
Gravity Forms, integrates in all kinds of ways, including submitting custom post types.