My favorite WordPress themes these days for building client sites are those from Studio Press using the Genesis framework.
The problem for people who are not very experienced in customizing themes is doing some simple tweaks. Fortunately, there are several great plugins to make those tasks much easier. Here are a list of my favorites:
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Genesis Title Toggle
Do you ever get irritated that the title of the page shows up at the top of the page by default? With Genesis Title Toggle you can control whether the title appears on the page or not. If you don’t want the title on most pages, then you can turn off the default in the Genesis theme settings. Each page editor has a check box to turn it on just for that page.
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Genesis Simple Edits
This plugin allows you to simply customize the information that appears under the title of your posts as well as to customize the credits section. That section is below the footer and contains the copyright info and links to Studio Press. I usually put a “designed by” credit in this area and have recently added the Sucuri badge for sites which are part of their security monitoring.
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Genesis Favicon Uploader
A favicon is the little image that appears in the tab of your browser when you are on a website. There are two issues if you want one of these for your website. First you have to create a favicon.ico file and then you have to know where to upload it. This plugin has a link to a favicon generator where you upload a regular image and it produces the favicon.ico for you. Then you just upload that file through the plugin just like you would any image.
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Genesis Simple Sidebars
Sometimes you need a different sidebar on different pages. Typically, themes give you a primary sidebar (for use with a 2-column layout) and a secondary sidebar (for use with a 3-column layout). The problem is that whatever you put in the sidebar will show up on every page. This plugin allows you to make as many different sidebars as you need. Then on the page editor, you’ll have a new drop down box to select the sidebar for that page.
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Genesis Featured Widget Amplified
Most Genesis themes have a widgeted home page. That means that instead of showing your posts or just a single page on the home page of your website, you have different areas to put widgets. For example, you could have a slider at the top, featured posts or pages in the middle, and any other widget at the bottom.
Genesis comes with a Featured Post Widget which can show the title, an image and/or an excerpt from selected posts. The Featured Page Widget allows the same information for a single page. This plugin gives you more control over these widgets. For example if you have an ecommerce store with products on pages, you could use this plugin to feature your latest products.
You can see a list of all Genesis plugins from the Studio Press folks here and there are many others created by Genesis website developers. Do you have some favorite Genesis plugins? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
