In the first part of Project WP, we installed WordPress and set it up for our convenience to improve visibility and attract more visitors. Today, we’re going to look at 8 absolutely essential plugins that significantly contribute to our efforts of creating a successful WordPress blog.

Part 2: Eight dead essential WordPress Plugins

WordPress is a fantastic platform for bloggers. If you’ve been thinking about getting into blogging, but you don’t know what awaits you, rest assured, for we are here to help. In the course of this series, we’ll take it step by step and explain how to create your own blog - with your very own custom theme. This involves the design part as well as the part working with PHP and CSS. Read on…

Here’s a great add to your bookmarks: we came across the newly launched Design Resources Search Engine the other day, which we’d like to point you to real quick. Jump over and take a look: the Google custom search crawls through the who’s who of the web’s graphic design sites, communities and blogs. It’s better than your standard Google search, because the results don’t show Splogs and other crap, but only search results from sites that have been carefully collected by the web designer Sacha Greif, the creator of the search engine - including our site :)

Thanks for this great resource, Sacha!

Project WordPress is a series of in-depth tutorials on creating a custom blog - step by step, and from scratch. Read about how to tweak WordPress to your liking, about useful and must-be plugins, working with PHP and CSS, and using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator professionally to create beautiful results: your very own, brand new WordPress Theme.

Part 1: WordPress Install, Setup, and Basic Optimization

In this first step of creating a whole new blog, we’ll take a look at wonderful WordPress and how we can set it up do do what we want. The standard install of WordPress is rather rudimentary, thus requires us to do a couple of adjustments, which, in our opinion, are crucial to creating a professional WordPress blog. Read on…

On a quick note: the last weeks have been quite busy for us. We’re working on several projects right now and things did get a bit stressful. That’s why we didn’t have the chance to post what we wanted to during the last two weeks.

But we have good news for you: we’re going to make up for it - big time!

One of the jobs we’ve been working on lately is the creation of a brand new WordPress blog from scratch. It included setting up WordPress, choosing, installing and customizing the best plugins, picking a basic theme, and remaking it completely including graphics, PHP and CSS. So basically, we created a new WordPress theme.

Here’s an appetizer:

What we’re going to do now is post the complete process of creating a WordPress blog here on Vibr8bros.com. This includes all of the above. The main pillars of this tutorial series will be:

• WordPress - installation, setup and plugins of choice;
• Blog Identity - creating the logo and identity of a blog;
• Blog Layout & Style - building the CSS and PHP on the basis of a basic theme to create a whole new WordPress theme of choice;
• Blog Graphics - creating the header and all graphics for the blog from scratch using Photoshop and Illustrator.

We will take it step by step and go through the complete process with you. We will talk about tweaking WordPress to your liking, useful and must-be plugins, working with PHP and CSS, and using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator professionally to create beautiful results. In the end, you’ll be able to apply the techniques we discuss to your own projects.

So, in the prospect of this great series coming up here on Vibr8bros.com - do you think you can excuse our recent blogging holiday?

Stay tuned…

Here we go folks, it’s time for some free Photoshop brushes! Here’s a set for you to play with.

These Photoshop brushes are high-resolution light strangs. The set contains six large brushes for you to use with Adobe Photoshop. You can see how the brushes look and download them after the jump! Read on…