Last updated April 25, 2013

Sarah Gooding

Stylish Plugin Sampler: 15 Design-Friendly Plugins For Your WordPress Site

Looking for some quick and easy ways to improve your WordPress site design? We’ve selected a few of the best plugins available for WordPress 3.0 that will help you give your site an instant face lift! Keep your visitors clicking on your site longer by adding some of these visually stimulating and interactive plugins.

Simple Cu3er

Cu3er Post Elements plugin displays any set number of your recent posts from a selected category via a flash gallery slider/rotator for your front page or header. It is customizable via the plugin’s control panel and uses random effects and transitions for each slide.

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SlideDeck

The SlideDeck WordPress plugin allows you to easily create a content slider widget or slideshow on your WordPress blog without having to write any code. Just create a new slider with the SlideDeck control panel tool and insert the widget into your post via the WYSIWYG editor with the TinyMCE plugin SlideDeck picker.

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MyPress

This plugin lets you customize your WordPress admin area and login screen with your logos and your color scheme. MyPress also gives you the opportunity of making your own unique administration area without touching code and without having previous knowledge in CSS or HTML.

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DynamicWP Contact Form

DynamicWP contact form creates a Contact button that will float on the left of the web page. If the button is clicked, the form will appear with slide effect. The form uses AJAX, so the page won’t be reloaded for the success/failure message.

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Zanmantou Web Audio/Video Player

This plugin allows the addition of video and audio to a WordPress website using standards-compliant markup (W3C) with the powerful, noncommercial Zanmantou Web Audio/Video Player. Installation is quick and easy. Everything works out-of-the-box and no additional setup/configuration knowledge is required.

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Google AJAX Feed Slide Show Widget

This plugin displays a photo slide show as a sidebar widget or in lined in your posts using a shortcode. The plugin uses Media RSS as a source and Google AJAX Feed API Slide Show. You can easily display a slide show from photo feeds from all popular sites, such as Expono, PhotoBucket, Flickr, and Picasa Web Albums.

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SlidePress

SlidePress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish slideshows in blog posts and pages. You can manage multiple SlideShowPro galleries with unique styling options. Multiple data sources for slideshow content are available, including the WordPress Media Library, SlideShowPro Director, Flickr, and more.

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Flickr + Highslide

This plugin displays flickr photos using highslide with 13 unique ways of displaying photos and 8 different gallery styles.

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WP SIMILE Timeline

This plugin integrates the SIMILE Timeline into WordPress and provides an option interface for the various timeline settings. Developed by SIMILE Labs, the Timeline is a web widget for visualizing temporal data.

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WP Utility Short Codes

Using WordPress short codes, this plugin will allow you to easily insert message boxes and buttons into your WordPress posts and pages. With easy to use options, there are over 1,000 possible display configurations. All buttons and message boxes include multiple color and size options.

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WP To Top

This plugin will add a “Back to top” link automatically to your blog. It features a smooth scrolling effect powered by the YUI library and customizable options.

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SuperSlider

SuperSlider base, is a global admin plugin for all SuperSlider plugins and comes stocked full of eye candy in the form of modules, including tooltips, reflection, zoomer, accordion, scroll, nudger, fader, linker, and clicker.

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Transitions – AJAX/jQuery Effects

This plugin gives you transition effects that you see on many AJAX-powered websites. It’s simple, plug-n-play and powered by jQuery.

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Post Highlights

This plugin adds a nice looking animated highlights box to your theme, and lets you highlight your posts with a beautiful jQuery box with a fade between each picture.