Back in 90’s blogging was at its infancy, and the so called “bloggers” just didn’t have the wide opportunities for blogging as we have nowadays. With the emergence of platforms such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com blogging became way easier and rich in ways for self-expression.
As the time went by blogging became an integral part of the internet and a medium that serves as a source for obtaining various information on a myriad of topics. Moreover, a blog with poor functionality and
Outdated interface is not an option nowadays.
If you want your blog to get noticed and stand out in the dense blogosphere you’ll have to give it a careful thought. All of its parts and aspects are important, but the interface and its overall look is what matters the most.
Below you can find a list of WordPress tools, which are aimed to enhance both the functionality of your blog and its look and feel at the same time. They have been personally tested and their quality is supported by the number of their users and high ratings.
Portfolio Gallery Theme
A good WordPress portfolio theme will totally transform the look and feel of your blog. Fortunately, with such an extensive number of available WordPress themes, you have a myriad of options to choose the one that corresponds to all your needs.
WordPress Portfolio Gallery theme has all the necessary features and functionalities to make your blog a real stand out. With its elegant and modern layout the theme enables you to best showcase your media content and instantly grab attention. Your posts and galleries will be displayed in beautiful image thumbs which show post/imageinfo. Also, the post featured images can be viewed in a slideshow within the powerful lightbox that the theme features. Portfolio Gallery is SEO-friendly, responsive and fully customizable to fit your every need.
Form Maker
Although the primary purpose of forms on the website is to serve as contacting means, they can also add some design elements to it. From Maker plugin is not only the most feature-rich and functional form builder in the WordPress directory, its customizable design options also make it a good investment for a better-looking website.
This WordPress form builder allows you to create simple and multipart forms using the drag and drop functionality, and provides a wide range of field options to add to the forms.The plugin comes with Captcha protection, custom CSS support, 37 editable themes, and many more features to help you to create questionnaires, surveys, registration and application forms with ease and as fast as possible.
Photo Gallery
It’s great if your website features a lot of images and visuals, but that also brings out a challenge that you’ll have to deal with. Organization! If you like to share images,videos and other media with your audience, then WordPress Photo Gallery plugin will be a great addition for your website. This WordPress gallery plugin will help you to organize your media content in galleries and albums and showcase them in beautiful views.
The views that it offers are as follows: Thumbnails, Masonry, Mosaic, Slideshow, Blog style for galleries, and Compact, Masonry, and Extended views for albums. The plugin is highly customizable, enabling you to set and adjust any setting or parameter to have your galleries look stunning. It comes with Tag Cloud, Dynamic Photo Gallery Tags Cloud, Photo Gallery Slideshow and Photo Gallery widgets.
With the available shortcodes and your theme’s PHP function you’ll be able to insert all of your galleries and albums in any post and page on your website.
Tablepress
If you happen to use and display tables on a WordPress powered website, you know how challenging it really is unless you use a third party tool to help you to get the work done. Well, one of those tools is Tablepress plugin, which enables you to easily create and insert tables to any of your posts and pages with the available shortcodes.
The tables support any kind of data and can be imported/exported from Excel, CSV and HTML files.Tablepress plugin also features an advanced editor to give the tables the style and look that you need. You can easily edit, delete or add any features to the tables and preview all the changes that you’ve made. The plugin will help you to display data tables on your website and give it a more organized and professional look.
Display Widgets
The way the sidebars of your website look truly affect your site’s overall design. The good news is that you can use the side parts of your website for your own benefit and make most out of them. Display Widgets plugin is there to help you to add/hide/manage the widgets on the sidebars of your website with simplyno efforts. The widgets can be easily hidden or displayed for a specific audience of your choice and on the particular pages that you want. For example, you can display the widgets in any posts, custom post types, categories, pages, etc.and manage them independently. The plugin doesn’t require any coding skills, just checking some boxes will be enough to get the job done.
No need to hire professional designers or developers to have a good-looking website. With the functionality that the WordPress provides you can build and design your website the way that you want and improve its look with ease over time. These functional plugins are great examples of how you can enhance the functionality of your site and at the same time improve its overall look. Feel free to suggest other plugins that you think are also worth mentioning.
Author Bio: Gayane Mar is a passionate web-blogger who started her blogging activity a few years ago. Her posts are all about web design and web development. She writes all these posts for good people who need some guidance or advice with web development. The driving force behind her writings is the great hope that her blog posts would be helpful for each and every one reading them. If you are interested you can follow her own blog wpcapitan.com