I have been building a lot of sites lately using Wordpress. It has come along way since I started this blog 3 years ago- Wordpress is now a full fledged content management system in its own right. Use it for a blog, or a small website. Or both.

The sites I have been building are for lead generation purposes, and functionally operate very similarly to each other. Since I have become very comfortable working with a certain set of tools, I thought I would document what I like to do.

Hosting
This can really determine if building your wordpress site is gratifying, or a nightmare. For ease of use, MediaTemple’s Grid Service Shared server space has been great. Their control panel is the most intuitive I have ever seen. (Which isn’t saying much since most hosting control panels are a complete nightmare). Their stability lately has been lacking, but they have always been responsive and the quality of the support is very good.

I just recently obtained a VPS on SliceHost that has been pretty cool too. Their control panel is…. well, there isn’t one. But this is a good thing- You just get your favorite Linux distro on a VPS “slice” with your specified resources and bandwidth allocation. So far the uptime has been perfect, the speed of service is incredible, and pricing is competitive for a VPS.

Themes
I have spent a lot of time in Wordpress’ theme extension directory. The thing is, the filter/search capabilities are terrible, and the variety of professional looking themes are slim. There is a huge lacking for more page-based (rather than blog based) sites. The good news is, they are free.

If you are willing to shell out a small amount ($10 to $40) I recommend Themeforest. Search for contributions by a guy named Kriesi for the best quality, best document, best looking themes around. I have now purchased three of his themes, and they never disappoint. They are well suited for blog purposes, business site purposes, or for portfolio work.

Plugins
Now that you have a nice looking working theme on your new hosting provider, its time to pimp out your site. Here are a few of my essentials:

BackupWordpress If your site is mission-critical, its best to have a backup. This plugin can backup your site files, your database, or both on a pre-determined schedule. I pair this with a simple bash script running on the server to move the backed up files to a more secure directory, and I sleep easy. Why wouldn’t everyone use this?

SEO Title Tags The default title tag in Wordpress is very limiting if you are engaged in making your site more search engine friendly. This plugin simply adds an additional field to your post and page editors, giving you the ability to craft the perfect title tag for your page.

Exec-PHP The lead-generation sites I have created require that I interface with the Salesforce.com Soap API using PHP. This handy plugin saved me when I thought I was sunk- It simply allows you to execute PHP in a page or a post. Once again, a simple concept that extends the capability of your Wordpress site exponentially.

Conclusion
That’s the overview. Using those tools you can have a great looking, robust, full-featured site up and running in about a day.