VautlPress: this service simply safeguards your website against hack attacks and disasters. It provides site backups, disaster recovery solutions, and security notifications.

CloudFlare: it can help improve your site’s performance and enhance its security. Its advanced security features are pretty powerful.

Pingdom: keeps track of your site’s uptime and notifies you when things go wrong. Offers email, Twitter, and text alerts. The premium plan includes error analysis.

CodeGuard: monitors your data and alerts you when things have changed on your website. This is especially helpful when you are facing a successful hack attack.

Scribe for WordPress: this is a premium tool that helps you take your SEO efforts to a whole new level. It covers keyword optimization, link building, and much more.

Amazon S3: the service we use in our company to backup our data to the cloud. It is super cheap and quite reliable.

SEOMoz: one of the best search engine optimization services you could possibly sign up for. These guys not only offer a ton of useful SEO tips, they have plenty of killer SEO tools for serious SEO campaigns.

CrazyEgg: would you like to know how people interact with various elements on your site? This service has that covered.

Hootsuite: the service I use to manage my social networking profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It can save you time keeping track of your favorite topics and filtering through the noise on sites such as Twitter. The message scheduling feature is a plus.

Tynt: offers a number of services webmasters can use to take their business to the next level. Tynt shows you what types of content your visitors value the most. It also adds a backlink to your site every-time someone copies your content.

What are some of the tools you can’t run your business without? Please share them here.

Themes for Appointments & Events:

These themes let you display your events on your site and allow your visitors to book appointments with your business.

Appointment for WordPress: a versatile theme that lets your visitors book their appointments with your business. It supports payments too.

Event for WordPress: a simple and clean theme to manage events on your website. You can use it to tell your visitors about your upcoming events.

Diarise: shows your past and future events on your site. It allows your visitors to add events to their calendars (or book their spots) fast.

Booking & Events Plugins:

These plugins let webmasters handle bookings and manage events without having to make major changes to their theme.

Booking Manager: a superb plugin for handling all your bookings. Takes advantage of jQuery and AJAX to provide you with a dynamic experience. The pro version supports exporting to CSV, advanced filters, and much more.

RSVP Plugin: a useful plugin for those of you who will be managing events. It lets you get a better sense of who will be attending your events.

Events Manager Extended: a complete event manager for WordPress that can handle public and private events. Provides support for iCal too.

Booking Calendar: turns your WordPress into an online reservation service. Works great for hotels but you can modify it to use for other purposes.

Event Calendar / Scheduler: an event calendar and scheduling system for WordPress. A decent tool to visualize your events with.

Simple Events Calendar: want to display your events on your posts and pages? This plugin has you covered.

RSVP Maker: as the name suggests, this plugin gives webmasters the ability to add RSVP capability to their website (free or paid).

The above plugins and themes are not for everyone but should do the job if you are interested in managing appointments and handling events on your site.

Please add your suggestions below.

There are plenty of companies that offer these services. We can’t speak for all of them. But here are three that our team has tested in the past:

VPS.net: we got familiar with this web host when we decided to switch our website to Nginx. Nginx is a light-weight web server that can outperform Apache in many areas. This service allows you to set up your server and do as you wish on your virtual private host. The good news is you are in control of how much resources you want to dedicated to your server (set of websites). You pay as you consume.

Rackspace: a wonderful hosting service for advanced users. It works for developers, bloggers, and community developers. Cloud computing is the present and the future. Using this service, you can guarantee maximum uptime. You only pay for what you use.

Media Temple: another reliable web hosting service that offers you virtual private server hosting. More advanced users can just rent their own dedicated server with maximum amount of control.

There is no perfect host out there. The above hosts are known to be reliable and give you a lot of flexibility with their plans. They won’t be cheap, which is why they may not be right for absolute beginners.

WordPress 3.0 Cheat Sheet: a good looking cheat sheet that covers all those page and tag functions. Your office needs one of these.

WordPress – What You Need To Know In One Sheet: a pretty handy sheet that covers as much as one can do in one sheet. Paul Maloney has done a wonderful j0b with this.

WordPress Visual Cheat sheet: the mother of all cheat sheets for WordPress. You can use it to get a crash course in WordPress or remember some of the things you may have forgotten.

WordPress 3.0 cheetsheet: covers those short-codes for WordPress 3.0. Pretty nice to print out and take advantage of.

WordPress Help Sheet: large enough to be used as wall-paper for your office or room. It never hurts to have this handy just in case you forget one of those code snippets.

WordPress Cheat Sheet: covers title, author, thumbnail, date, login/logout, and comment tags. It’s print-friendly too. It’s pretty high quality stuff.

SEO Cheat sheet: not a WordPress cheat sheet per se, but one every WordPress blogger or portal developer needs to check out.

Template Designer Cheat Sheet: it is pretty handy if you are designing a portal or theme and want to have everything in order by the time you are done.

WordPress Theme Development Check List: another handy cheat sheet for theme developers. Covers things you need to pay attention to when developing your very own theme.

WordPress maintenance checklist: setting up your WordPress site is one part of the process. You will need to maintain it on a weekly or monthly basis. This cheat sheet can help.

Please feel free to add your favorite WordPress cheat sheets below.

Web Informer offers you two themes to choose from. One can be used as a dynamic button after your posts. The other adds an attractive social media bar to your footer. It includes all those top sites, including Facebook, Google Buzz, Twitter, and even Mixx. Here is how your social-bar will look like.

Your visitors can not only use the above buttons to submit each of your pages to their favorite websites, they can expand the bar to use other services available through it.

You can always grab the code from Web Informer or just use the below code to implement this service on your website.

Web Informer gives you yet another cool way to add those social media buttons to each and every post on your website. If you want more traffic and want to count on users to spread your content around the Web, Web Informer’s social bar is worth a try.

Compete: Compete is for power players. It gives you all kinds of information on your competitors and helps you optimize your own strategies. Whether you are looking for more keywords, want to increase your traffic, or find out what your competitors are doing right, Compete has you covered.

SEOmoz: not only has some of the best search engine optimization tips around, it has a set of tools that can help you find out more about your website (and more importantly your competitors’ websites).

SpyFu: the ultimate keyword spy tool for search engine and advertising professionals. Can dig up your competitors’ keywords and campaigns. Its Kombat tool lets you compare your website against those of your competitors’.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spy tools around. If you intend to promote affiliate products on your site or just want to find out what keywords people are bidding on, this is the tool you need for your research.

Market Samurai: unlike the above tools, Market Samurai is a desktop application. It has plenty of modules to help you do your keyword research, find out about your competitors, and find new ways to promote your websites.

There is nothing wrong with spying on your competitors and learning from their strategies. If you have a popular website, you can be absolutely sure that others use these types of tools to spy on you. While you do not want to clone everything others have done, the above keyword spy tools can help you learn some new things.

Wibiya: one of the most exciting social bars available for WordPress (we are using it on this site too). It has free and paid plans and let your visitors connect with you more effectively.

Meebo Bar: lets you add Facebook, Twitter, and other social sharing capabilities to your website. You can use it to chat with your website visitors too.

ShareBar: a powerful plugin that adds floating social sharing buttons to your website. Similar to what Mashable is doing on its website.

Digg Digg: very similar to the previous plugin but there are some differences between them. This one has more options and services, but it is slightly less flexible than ShareBar.

Gigya Toolbar: adds 80 social destinations including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Yahoo to your website. It loads after your page has finished loading, which means your visitors won’t notice any speed difference on your site.

TurnSocial: a more compact solution than some of the above toolbars. It does support top social networks and local websites (such as Foursquare).

Skysa Bar: a simple to use social app bar for WordPress. It has plenty of apps and give your visitors all the tools they need to help push your content.

Apture: sits at the top of your website and shows itself when your visitors go through your content or search for something. It can increase the number of hits on your website and can help your visitors share your content with their friends.

iconcy.com WordPress toolbar: adds a vertical bar to your website, giving your visitors the ability to find their way back to your home page, RSS feed, or Twitter presence easily.

Extendy: has links to Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. Your visitors can use your toolbar to search through your content too.

Web Informer: gives you two options. You can either use the social button available on this website to promote your posts or you can choose the “Glass Theme” and add a social footer bar to your blog.

Static Toolbar: lets you display last posts, rss feed, search engine, social network and sharing links at the bottom of your pages.

WordPress Toolbar: supports plenty of social networking websites and lets you add them as a toolbar to WordPress.

Conduit: it’s a desktop toolbar that you can take advantage of to push your top categories and post. It’s like having your own Google-like toolbar.

WP External Links Bar: adds a Digg-bar like functionality to your website, meaning that people won’t be leaving your website completely even when they click on your external links.

The WordPress Bar: another toolbar that sits on the top of your website and lets your visitors give your content love while they browse through your pages and links.

WordPress Admin Bar: adds WordPress.com’s admin bar functionality to your website, making it easy for you to manage your posts and add new ones.

Drag-To-Share: makes sharing content and images on your website as easy as dragging things to toolbar. Again, similar to what Mashable is doing.

Snipi for WordPress: lets you add content to your WordPress gallery by just dragging and dropping items. Makes life easier for super busy bloggers.

Fixed Social Buttons: a plugin that we were using on this site until recently. It sits your social media buttons at a fixed position on your website and reminds your visitors to connect with you on those sites.

WP Super Bar: a simple toolbar for those external links on your website. Gives your site a better chance of getting some love from social media addicts.

Notification Toolbar: add a notification bar to your website, giving you the opportunity to announce your news or connect more effectively with your first time visitors.

Please feel free to add your suggestions below.

PadPressed: a theme (or plugin if you want to call it that) that turns your WordPress website into a native iPad or something close to it. It’s very dynamic and can make almost any website iPad friendly.

WordPress for iOS: need I say more? This iPad application gives you an easy way to keep up with your WordPress website when you are on the move.

iPad-Widget: inserts your image on the top of an iPad image. Pretty useful if you want to share what you are reading on your iPad (or anything else you are done).

Mobility: a slide and mobile friendly theme for WordPress. It is very image friendly and can be used for your personal or business projects.

Boooster:  a solid business theme for WordPress that works fine if you happen to get many visitors from mobile devices such as iPad.

There will surely be more WordPress solutions for iPad in the future. Stay tuned!

As long as you have a Google Wave account, you should be ready to go (if you have a Google account, you are set). Once you have logged on to your account, you need to grab the link for the wave that you want to add to your blog. Grab the link from the top of your browser and use Google Wave Element tool to grab the code you will need to add Wave to your website.

Here you can define the size of your wave as well as other factors of your wave. Make sure you add public@a.gwave.com if you intend to create a public wave. Don’t forget to check “Full Access” box if you want others to be able to add their information to your Wave.

That’s it. Just grab the code from Google and add it to your blog. No plugin needed. The whole process should take about 10 minutes at most. Google Wave is a pretty powerful tool if you can figure out how to use it to improve your website.

We have all heard this before: “you can do everything with WordPress.” That’s actually true. WordPress is a powerful open source content management system that can handle any type of website, as long as you have the right theme. Best of all, in most cases, you won’t have to break the bank to get the job done.

If you are interested in adopting WordPress, here are 50 things you can do it right-away:

1. Create an Online Store

Starting an online store with WordPress couldn’t get any easier these days. There are plenty of WordPress themes that let you start your online store and don’t cost you much. There are some plugins that let you do that too.

2. Start a Job Board

A job board can add a whole new dimension to your blog. It can not only help employers reach out to your community, it also provides unique value to your readers. The times are tough and any help you can provide your reader can only solidify your community. These job board themes let you start a job board with WordPress quickly.

3. Start a Forum

Lots of people use phpBB and vBulletin to start their forums. Did you know that you can do that with WordPress too? gForums is a good theme to do just that (our review).

4. Develop a Classified Website

Sites such as Craigslist are very popular and quite useful for people who are looking for things they may not be able to find in stores. Of course, there is a whole lot more to Craigslist. Nevertheless, with these classified themes, you can start your own free or paid classified listing website fast.

5. Go Micro-blogging

Everybody has seen Twitter and sites similar to that. It’s nice to be involved in those communities but sometimes you want to have your very own micro-blog. Thanks to micro-blogging themes such as this one you can get the job done quickly.

6. Go for a Celebrity Website

Celebrity blogging is not for everyone. It can be very lucrative if you know what you are doing though. Thanks to WordPress celebrity themes, you can start your own celebrity portal using WP platform.

7. Clone Everything with WordPress

That’s right. Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and CNN can all be cloned using WordPress. These WP clone themes should get you started.

8. Take your Restaurant Business Online

If you own an offline food business, there is no reason you should not start a website for your business to connect with your customers. These WordPress restaurant themes let you do just that.

9. Start an Online Presence For Your Retail Business

Those of you who own an offline retail business and want to reach out to more prospects online can use these retail themes to get started in a flash.

10. Become a Pro Blogger

Those of you who are passionate about blogging and want to go full-time with your blogging efforts are going to love using WordPress. These pro-blogging themes should give you a head-start with your efforts.

11. Create a Question & Answer Website

We have all seen Yahoo! answers and Linkedin Q&A. You can use Answer theme to create a similar site fast.

12. Take your Real Estate Business Online

Those of you who are making a living out of selling and renting houses should take time to build an online presence for your business. These real estate themes let you accomplish that.

13. Create an Online Store For Kids

Selling kid items can be profitable offline. It’ll be even more profitable if you have an online store. Kidz Store theme is just the solution for that.

14. Promote Your iPhone Application

Developing an iPhone app is only the beginning. iPhone app developers need to promote their app properly if they want to be successful. Thanks to these iPhone WordPress themes, you can build a mini portal for your iPhone app in an affordable fashion.

15. Start a Website For Your Church

That’s right. Even churches need to have an online presence these days. It’s a great way to stay in touch with others and share updates with them. These church themes can make life easier.

16. Develop a Wedding Website

Your wedding is going to be one of the most important days of your life. That obviously goes without saying. Thanks to Mr. & Mrs. you can create an online site to cover your wedding.

17. Promote Your Resume

If you are looking for a job, you shouldn’t just focus on offline sources for leads. Sharing your resume online can open doors for you. MyResume is just the theme for that.

18. Share Your Personal Website With the World

The most common category of WordPress themes is “personal.” There are a ton of bloggers who use their blog to rant or share their thoughts with the world. Themes such as PersonalPress let you start your personal blog fast.

19. Develop a Gaming Portal

If you are into gaming or just want to make money talking about games, these WP gaming themes are for you.

20. Share Your Travel Experiences With the World

Lots of people make a living out of traveling around the globe. You can too if you are into travel blogging. These travel themes should get you started on the right path.

21. Create a City Guide

If you happen to live in one of those small cities, you may not have a decent site that covers your city’s events properly. Thanks to City Guide theme you can start one by yourself.

22. Sell Your E-book

Have you written an e-book? Maybe you want to monetize your existing book more effectively. E-book theme is just the template for that.

23. Take Your University Online

If you want to build an online presence for your college or just want to start an online university, themes such as this one can help you out.

24. Start a Video Blog

More people are using video to communicate with the world these days. You can have your own video blog as long as you don’t have any issue showing up in front of camera or can capture decent videos on a consistent basis. If you are interested, these vlogging themes have you covered.

25. Start an Event Site

Want to build a site to share your upcoming events with the world? Diarise is just the theme for that. Works with calendar solutions too.

26. Share your Mommy Tips With the World

There are plenty of “mommy” websites around. You can have yours too. f1010 is a WordPress theme for ladies that can be used for that purpose.

27. Get Your Own Social Media Friendly Website

These days, if you are not taking advantage of social media, you are missing the boat. It helps if you put the effort to make your blog more social media friendly. Antisocial is one of those themes that is social media friendly right out of the box.

28. Pitch your Start-up

Every startup owner should take time to start a website for his/her venture. These days, you can’t afford not to have one. Feature Pitch is a very easy to implement theme for startups that helps them share their information with the world online.

29. Own an Online Directory

Online directories may be old school, but you can still get some value out of them. DirectoryPress is a theme that enables you to start an online directory using WordPress.

30. Promote Coupons Online

You want to get in the online coupon business? CouponPress is an attractive WordPress theme just for that purpose.

31. Start a Flashy Portal

Many assume that WordPress is only good for blogs. In reality, you can use it to develop sophisticated portals as well. 13Floor is one of many attractive CMS themes for WordPress.

32. Clone Hulu

Pretty self-explanatory. If you want to develop a website similar to Hulu, OnDemand is just the theme for it.

33. Push Your Business

Businesses can get a lot of value out of WordPress. The platform is open source, gets upgrades on a frequent basis, and has tons of attractive business themes.

34. Take Your Agency Online

I can’t remember the last time I saw a professional agency that did not have a website. If you are just starting or want to give your site a make-over, Agency Theme is worth a look.

35. Bring Your Photographs Online

Photographers can use themes such as Family Tree to bring their work online and share them with the world.

36. Create a Portfolio

You can use WordPress portfolio themes to bring all your artwork online and share them with the world. A great way to get recognition for your art.

37. Push Your Consulting Business

Freelancing can be difficult if you are not using all the tools that are available to you these days. Every freelancer needs to have a website. Consultant theme for WordPress lets you build one quickly. j

38. Develop a News Portal

Think we don’t have enough news sites these days? Maybe you want to start one yourself? These news themes for WordPress should do the job.

39. Start an Eco Friendly Portal

Interested in starting a website about the environment and green technologies? Eco-Pro is one of many themes that lets you get the job done. It helps that the developers are willing to donate 10% of your cost to help save the environment.

40. Get Going with Your Own Technology blog

Want to start the next Tech Crunch? Maybe you are just passionate about technology. Whatever the case, these technology blogging themes are worth a look

41. Talk Politics

If you want to be the next top conservative or progressive blogger, these political themes should come handy.

42. Start a Gossip Site

Gossip sites are very popular (beats me why). If you want to capitalize on this market and build a website covering it, gossip themes such as this one can help.

43. Get Your Broker Realty Business Online

WordPress can be pretty helpful for real estate brokers too. If you happen to be one and have multiple agents working for you, Broker Theme can help you manage them more effectively.

44. Build a Community

There are plenty of community themes around. Lots of people use non-WordPress CMS to go about starting their own online communities. Themes such as Initiate let you do just that with WordPress.

45. Create an RSS Aggregator

Want to start the next AllTop? Or maybe you just want to share your favorite feeds with the world. Accumulo and OneNews are two themes that help you accomplish just that.

46. Start a Local News Website

If you would like to start a local news site, WordPress is your best friend. These types of sites can be very helpful, especially if there are not too many alternatives available to your community. Local Theme is just the theme for that.

47. Take Your Magazine Online

Whether you want to take your paper magazine online or want to start a digital-only magazine, these magazine themes can help.

48. Go Professional with Your Portal

Not all premium themes are created equal. Some are just better designed than others. Those of you who are aiming for a super professional-looking portal using WordPress should give Rocket Themes a try.

49. Go Tumblogging

Tumblr is quite popular among social media gurus. It’s yet another way to attract followers and drive traffic to a website. Themes such as Cinch let you start your own tumblog using WordPress.

50. Go Live with Your Sports Portal

Want to start the next ESPN? Maybe you are tired of the same good old commentary by people on those sports websites. WordPress sport themes let you take your passion for sports to the next level.

There you have it: 50 types of websites you can create with WordPress. Of course, WordPress is capable of much more. But the above solutions should give you an idea what this platform is capable of (don’t forget to check these WP coupons to save on some of the above themes).

Any suggestions?