Welcome back.
Now while themes change the look of our site in order to change what our site does or to change the
functionality we need to use what WordPress calls plug ins.
And if you go to the left hand side menu and you go to the plugins area and click the link it will take
you to all of the plugins that are already installed.
And one of the things that you'll notice is something that was discussed at the very beginning of the
course and it is the Kismet plug in.
And you'll notice that the Kismet plug in what it does is it blocks spam.
So one of the things that you're WordPress site does is it blocks spam.
If you want your WordPress site to do more what you'll have to do is to add plug ins to it in order
to change the functionality.
So in order to get started looking for plug ins what you're going to do is click the Add new button
and what you're going to notice right away is that WordPress is going to give you some featured plug
ins just as we saw before with the themes.
WordPress will tell you about very popular plug ins just as it did with the themes.
It will also tell you about recommended plug ins.
Now one of the best ways in order to find good plug ins is to start by searching inside of the WordPress
dashboard.
So for example if you wanted to add Google Analytics which is a way to keep track of your site statistics
and traffic you would go to the search plugins area and type in Google Analytics once you typed it in.
Click enter
and your dashboard will begin to show you plug ins that will be options for you to install on your WordPress
site.
Now one of the things that you can do in order to narrow down your choices is to start looking at the
actual reviews and you'll notice that this one had six hundred thousand installs and thirty eight people
reviewed it.
This one has twenty nine reviews and had twenty thousand people view it.
So you're getting the idea.
You can find a plug in by going through these plug ins and figuring out which one has the best reviews
and which one you are the most comfortable with.
So let's take a look at this one and decide to install it.
It has good reviews and it has a fairly high number of installations so we can then click install.
Now you'll see WordPress going through the installation process and we can then click activate plug
in WordPress will take a few minutes to get it installed and then you'll notice now that the Google
Analytics counter tracker is now added to our plugins area so you might ask what can you do now.
So how do you customize this plug in.
Well whenever you install a new plug in the first thing you'll do is you'll go to the settings area
and you were going to look for a link something that is close to what you just installed and you'll
see here it says analytics counter
and this will give you all of the details that you'll need in order to customize your plug in.
Now in some cases you'll find that menu in the tools or other times within posts and pages but typically
you'll find the details of a plug in inside of the settings area.
Now there are all kinds of plug ins to change the functionality.
And if we go back to the install plug ins we can take a look there and once again once we're here we're
going to click add new and just by taking a look at some of the featured plug ins we can see what other
people are doing with their site and other things that people are taking advantage of.
For example some people are using a forum other people are causing their site to run faster.
If we look at some of the popular themes some people are doing things like adding custom fields.
Some people are doing search engine optimization.
Some people are displaying their galleries.
And so these are going to be ideas that you can use in order to determine what you can do to make your
WordPress site everything that you want it to be.
Now your word parasite can be more than a blog.
It can be a business site but it will require some customization such as a kind of customization that
you're looking at such as a kind of customization that you're looking at in the plug in Section OK.
So with that thanks.
And I will see you in another video.