As you may or may not know, I love WordPress. I've been actively developing with it for over 4 years, and have seen it progress from a simplistic blogging tool to the awesome fully-fledged Content Management System that it is now!
In that time, i've come across hundreds if not thousands of plugins. Some are okay, others are terrible but some are just mind-blowingly awesome that you just have to hop around the office in celebration (well, maybe not that last bit!).
To give you a kick-starter with your WordPress site, I strongly recommend the following plugins :
Numero 1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
Words cannot describe how great and under-rated this plugin is. My golly it turns your already potent web site into something incredible. What I love most about this plugin is the level of flexibility it gives you and the ability to setup templates for the META code (the bits and bobs the search engines see, but not users). I will probably do a tutorial soon on the settings I use, and why.
Numero 2. Sub-Page Widget
When you're building a "site" as opposed to a blog, you'll most probably need the ability to show other pages within the section the visitor is looking at. This plugin is so simple, and does the job nicely. Awesome!
Numero 3. PHP Code Widget
The number of times this widget has enabled me to kick some template ass is incredible. It allows you to use PHP code inside a widget (widgets are often used to show recent blogs, tweets etc) and saves a lot of development time! I tend to use this in case i'm referring to images in the template folder, by slapping in the following :
<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/images/logo.png"/>
Numero 4. Twitter Tools
One word : fantastic! Although you could argue it's a little more "involved" to setup it's actually a very well built plugin / widget. It registers your website as a proper "app" with twitter so that you use Twitter's API and reduce the number of errors you might receive when using an RSS based plugin.
This plugin allows you to show your recent tweets, but also to tweet when changes are made on the site. Again, it's template based, so you can say do something like this, and it'll just work!
"Fantasimo new blog post release : [blog_title]"
Numero 5. NextGen Gallery
This plugin is incredibly powerful and a bit convoluted to start with. However, once you've got your head around galleries, photos and albums, you'll be away! Not much more to say about this, except it's awesome.
I hope this short list of plugins comes in useful for you. I might start posting shorter updates when I come across those plugins that make me want to dance. Look for more soon!