When you decide to launch a new blog site like Mobile Friendly, one of the first things that you are going to be confronted with is what theme and plugins to use. Your choice of a theme and the plugins for your site will make a huge difference in the way it looks and functions for your user. The better your site looks and the easier it is to use will greatly benefit you in converting visitors into subscribers and long-term readers.

I know what you are thinking… “What about great content, Gary?” Content is very important, and I will get to that in the next installment, but if your site turns the visitor off before he even reads one post then your great content is not doing you any good.

For the theme, as I mentioned in the previous article, I chose the Suffusion theme because of its flexibility and the fact that it is SEO ready so you do not need to add a plugin like the All in One SEO pack to it. It does take a bit of time to get the theme configured the way you want, but that is only because there are so many options available for you to choose from. There are several preconceived templates that you can choose from that will reduce the setup time dramatically, but I prefer the custom method myself.

After I installed the theme, I had to decide what plugins to use. The plugins added cover many areas including social networking, security, functionality, statistics, and additional SEO.

Security is always a major concern when you put a website online, so its a natural decision to look for ways to better secure it. WordPress is fairly secure straight out of the box but there are several vulnerabilities that can be exploited to get your site hacked.

One thing that all sites with an admin section face is a brute force break-in attack. With this type of attack, the login page is repeatedly bombarded with user name/password combinations until the site is broken into. This is easily preventable in WordPress by installing the Login Lockdown plugin to limit the number of attempts at the login page and then lockout the IP address of the attacker.

With social networking there are a couple of plugins that I always use. The TweetMeme button plugin is an industry staple and can be seen on nearly every blog out there. It is very effective in getting people to promote your blog to their Twitter followers.

The other social plugin that I like is AddThis. It allows your visitors to share your post with over 200 social networking and bookmarking sites. They can even share it with their friends and colleagues via email or print it out for sharing in a physical form.

There are many other plugins that I used in creating this site. Click here for a complete PDF list of them all and the reasons that I chose to use them.

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