My list is pretty similar to this one: http://zemalf.com/713/most-essential-wordpress-plugins/ http://zemalf.com/713/most-essential-wordpress-plugins/ though

My list is pretty similar to this one: http://zemalf.com/713/most-essential-wordpress-plugins/ http://zemalf.com/713/most-essential-wordpress-plugins/ though zemalf also discusses an alternative list: http://zemalf.com/1407/must-have-wordpress-plugins/ http://zemalf.com/1407/must-have-wordpress-plugins/ Other ones that I would install: Contact Form 7 (if you want people to be able to contact you) Some kind of sharing plugin like addthis, addtoany or sociable I so wish I had a resource like zemalf when I first started my Wordpress blog 2 years ago. Many posts on the site explain how to do things on Wordpress that you really should be doing, with detailed step-by-step instructions. I especially liked the series on Optimizing using W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN - though you may not want to worry about Optimization until you get to a few hundred page views per day. Note that you also need to choose a theme. I suggest using a theme framework. CSS and PHP get customized in your child theme, so when you upgrade the framework or Wordpress your theme won't break. I use the thematic framework but there are others (http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Frameworks http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Frameworks).