Planning on creating or revamping your site or blog? That’s the right time to think about how to make your site “sticky”. That means, you want your visitors to stay on your site longer, come back more often and even share or recommend your site to their friends and colleagues. In order to make your site sticky, you need a strong visual impact.
According to a study by Jakob Nielsen (christened “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times), an average website visitor spends some of his time understanding the page layout and navigation features, as well as looking at the visuals. Less than 4 seconds is spent on reading every 100 words of text and this keeps decreasing as the length of the page increases.
This means that your site or blog needs images, videos and other visual aids to grab attention and retain visitors. Read about some of the most easy to use, yet effective WordPress plugins that will do wonders for your site’s popularity.
5 Top most WordPress Plugins:
If programming is not your forte, the only way you can spice up your site is by installing plugins. Here are some of the best plugins to install on your site,
WordPress Photo Gallery:
You can use this plugin to prepare a slideshow of images. This WordPress image gallery plugin allows you to create multiple albums and has Facebook sharing features. The Mac Dock effect lends a chic appeal to your website. Also, when a visitor places the cursor over an image, it becomes larger and the other images shift back, enabling the visitor to switch between the previous image and the next one very easily. This easy to install plugin allows the entire WordPress photo album list to be displayed in thumbnail format, with Ajax pagination. You can even import albums easily from Picasa, Flickr and Facebook.
WordPress Video Gallery:
This plugin offers HTML5 support to play videos in iOS devices. You can easily add YouTube videos and share them easily with social networking features. This WordPress video plugin allows you to add a video banner display to your website, where you can show videos from any category. The search interface is really easy and you can set video buffering in the back-end. You can customize the scaling (size) of the videos and choose from among 6 stylish skins. The share button in this video gallery plugin allows you to embed your video on other websites.
HD Flv Player Plugin:
If you want video clarity, this is the WordPress video player plugin to opt for. This plugin supports videos in formats FLV / H.264 encoded video including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, F4V. You have the benefit of HTML5 support, allowing videos to be played from iOS devices. Customize the video scaling to full screen or normal scale player and choose a skin that suits your website the best. Add YouTube videos very easily with this and even embed your videos on other websites by simply clicking on the share button. The backend allows video descriptions and buffering. A WordPress flash player is a great way to keep your visitors on your site.
Pica Photo Gallery:
If you like the Picasa web albums, you are going to love this plugin as well. Compatible with WordPress 3.0 and higher, Pica photo gallery extension brings the best features of Picasa web albums to your site. As a website admin, you get the flexibility to organize images in multiple albums, add title and description to each image and upload multiple images in one go. For easy management, Pica photo gallery allows you to select featured photos, assign album cover and sequence images with just one click. Just add the short code for Pica photo gallery extension to display any of the albums on a page. The product comes loaded with all the good display features of a WordPress photo gallery, such as full screen shows, Facebook share button and multiple zoom options.
WordPress Slider Gallery:
If you want real control on the display of sliders and albums on your WordPress blog or site, WordPress slider gallery is the tool for you. Apart from providing effective solution to manage a huge stack of images, this WordPress slider gallery offers amazing control by allowing image resize options, selecting thumbnails’ sizes and slide show for a specific album. You can also launch slide shows for images based on multiple tags, such as recent, popular or features. This way, the sliders on your site will be even more dynamic. It is easy to install and configure, allows your friends and users to download images from the front-end and allows Facebook commenting and sharing.
By installing these and other good plugins, you can create a site with many more features and enhance user experience. As your visitors explore more dimensions on your site, the time spent by them increases.