Yesterday, I mentioned the reasons I thought WordPress was a great learning tool. Stephan Spencer over at Business Blog Consulting also has some thoughts about why WordPress is a good choice even if you’re not running a blog site.

If you’re serious about getting a WordPress site started, here are some plugins that I’ve found to be indispensable when I was building this site.

Like most WordPress plugins, they’re free of course, and all quite easy to set up. I’ve provided links to all the plugins that don’t automatically come with your default WordPress install.

5. Subscribe to Comments.

I personally loved this feature when I saw it on other people’s sites (I like to post comments but often forget where and when I’ve posted comments, so a reminder by email’s always useful).

You can grab the Subscribe to Comments plugin over here at txfx.net.

4. Sociable.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve never been a big user of social bookmarking sites.

Yet I understand that people use and love their particular sites, and of course I’d like to provide anyone reading my site with the ease of bookmarking my pages in their preferred social bookmarking site.

The Sociable plugin available at push.cx is a great way to offer people this functionality.

3. Google Sitemaps.

When I looked at the documentation that Google provided on how to build a sitemap for my site, I was a little overwhelmed. Throughout most of the instructions, I didn’t even know what they talking about.

Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress will build and configure your sitemap for you without any thinking on your part. You can download it from Arne Barchhold’s site.

2. Permalink Redirect.

This another case of reading the instructions and being completely baffled. I had installed WordPress and it was showing my posts as numbers in the address bar, and I wanted to change that to the hyphen-separated words that you see now.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong. I made a few unsuccessful attempts to get it working myself before finding the Permalink Redirect plugin over at fucoder.com, which completely took care of all the redirects for me. Brilliant.

1. Akismet.

The basic idea behind Akismet is the same as having a spam filter in your email box. I never really thought comment spam would be much of a problem for me, but I’ve already had Akismet block hundreds of spam comment messages. This is essential for any site owner.

And if you’re installing WordPress for the first time, it already comes with your install, so don’t worry about going looking for it.

If you’re wondering what some other people think are great WordPress plugins, check out Ronald Heft over at cavemonkey50.com’s list of his top 10 plugins.