As for me, I use WordPress exclusively for blogging, but it’s always good to know that if I do decide to expand into a full website, I already have the tools needed to do so.

WordPress 3.0 comes with a new default theme called “Twenty Ten”, compatible with many of the new features that 3.0 has come to offer. The image that you place in the banner of your website can actually be dynamic. With this feature, you can choose to have a unique banner be displayed for all posts within a certain category, or even specific to just a single post. This makes the content flow nicely with the theme.

Another useful feature that comes packed with 3.0 is the ability to perform mass updates on all of your outdated plug-ins. Personally, I have over a dozen plug-ins that I use, and I’m always experimenting with others. It was always tedious to update them one at a time, but this new feature makes it very simple to keep my blog up to date.

I have just two WordPress blogs, but I’m sure that many readers have dozens, if not hundreds of blogs that they manage with WP. WordPress 3.0 makes it possible to manage an infinite number of blogs over a single WP installation. For many people, this will be their absolute favorite addition to 3.0. No more having to remember dozens of passwords and URLs. No more forgetting about one of your blogs because you’ve been too busy with others’. No more having to install the same plugin dozens of times to keep your blogs synced. WordPress 3.0 lets you manage all of your blogs at once.

There are tons of changes from over 200 contributors, making WordPress 3.0 their largest community-based project to date. Check out the long list of changes here.

Related posts:

1. WordPress “Matrix” Easter Egg Trick | Fun WP Tricks
2. How to Protect Your WordPress Blog from Spam
3. Problems with WordPress 2.9: Pings Failing to Alert the Google Blogging Service

Google PageRank
PageRank is Google’s patented term that is used to describe how important that they believe a page to be on the Internet. This value is not assigned to the website as a whole, but rather to the individual pages contained within it. Click here to read a previous article that I wrote regarding this holy number.

- The Google Toolbar shows the PageRank of any page you are currently viewing.

As a webmaster, PageRank should be more important to you than anything else on this list, but it’s not the most accurate depiction of success. Realize that PR is only a number from zero through ten, and it’s only updated every few months, so there are much better tools to use for short-term indications of growth. Moving on…

Alexa Traffic Ranking

Alexa is a web-based company that tracks information from people all over the world that have their toolbar installed. Alexa tracks a variety of statistics for [almost] all websites, and it ultimately assigns each website it’s own traffic ranking. For example, Google is currently ranked #1, while as of this writing, this site is ranked #4,257,978. In my own defense, I just acquired this domain about a week ago, and the Alexa ranking is based on the past three months worth of data, so I have nowhere to go but up for the next few months.

As stated before, Alexa can only gather data from people who have their toolbar installed. Thus, the lower your traffic ranking, the less accurate it is.

Analytical Software

Piwik and Google Analytics are my two favorite stat-tracking software applications that simply provide you with a snippet of code to include in all pages that you would like tracked. From there, you log into their web interface and can instantly view visitor information from dozens of different angles. This offers you perfectly accurate and up to date information which can be viewed at any time.

If you are a webmaster relying on things like awstats and Webalizer alone to reveal your visitor information, I strongly advise that you look into a more advanced solution. I have installed Piwik on my web server, and I made my traffic information publicly viewable, so if you are interested in a demo of just how much information it gathers, check out Piwik.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is an absolute must. The majority of your organic traffic will most likely be coming from Google, and with this tool you will be able to gain information that cannot be found anywhere else. Google will provide you with a list of your site’s keywords, a detailed list of search queries that generated clicks to your website, and a list of relevant incoming links. You can use this information to your advantage, essentially “sculpting” your website to be friendly with Google.

As a webmaster looking to direct more visitors to your website, it would be to your greatest advantage to make your site compatible with Google’s spider, Googlebot, and that is one of the main reasons that Google created this wonderful application.

Related posts:

1. How do Keywords Impact SERPs
2. How to Increase Your Google PageRank
3. The Importance of Backlinks

If you’re interested in using this free software for your own website, there are a couple of things that I should point out. By default, it updates the database every 10 seconds (it is supposed to be live, after all), and this could get to be very resource demanding if you are using a shared server. To change this, edit the global.ini.php file located in the config folder, and change the time_before_today_archive_considered_outdated variable to the desired number of seconds between updates. I currently have mine set to update every five minutes, which cuts the load thirty-fold.

There is also a bug I found that seemingly occurs every time you change the activated widgets; I’ve noticed that it only happens with certain web browsers. This glitch causes your page to constantly refresh after displaying a JavaScript error. To fix this, simply truncate your piwik_user_dashboard table and the problem should be instantly solved. You will have to do this every time you decide to change the widgets.

Other than that, I haven’t run into any major issues with the software. I made my traffic stats publicly available, so click here if you want to check it out.

Related posts:

1. Identifying Growth and Popularity on the Internet
2. Thoughts on Google Wave
3. Highly Impressed with Google AdWords