One of the many wonderful features of WordPress are its widgets. Widgets are a kind of plugin that provide visitors with visual and interactivity options and features. They were designed for the “programming impaired” — those of us old folks who are easily inspired to bang our heads on the keyboard when faced with the too-often daunting task of learning and writing code.

But fear not, old farts! Many of the most useful features that are required for any blog site are already pre-programmed and there for the taking. Do you want a search box? Click and drag it to your sidebar. Do you want a list of your recent blog posts prominently displayed? Grab and go! How about some handy navigation links to help your readers find the content they want? It’s yours!

As a beginning blogger, I chose a background theme that included several of the standard widgets available in WordPress. The one I added was the text widget. I titled my text widget as “Quote of the Day” and put what is probably the best known quote about statistics under the heading.

Why the text widget? I think it’s useful for blogs oriented to a particular topic to have a place to highlight small bits of related information.

For example, a blog on media bias might put a link to an article that represents a particularly egregious example. A personal portfolio blog might link to an article or video featuring the work of the author but housed on another Web site. An industry blog might highlight “fast facts” their viewers would find interesting and useful.

The text widget is a quick-and-easy way to add additional content that gives the blog a feeling of depth — with minimal effort — making the lives of the “programming averse” a lot less stressful.

While I am amazed by the sheer number of available Plugins for WordPress, I am more impressed by the variety. And such creativity! There are so many good Plugins it was hard choose… but here are three I think are useful to bloggers.

Number 1: Broken Link Checker — Broken links are a most annoying problem, often plaguing larger, poorly managed Web sites. This handy Plugin will search your site and alert you if it finds a broken link or a bad redirect. How cool is that?

Number 2: Google XML Sitemaps — As realtors say, what matters is: Location! Location! Location! For bloggers, any address in cyberspace can be a “hot spot,” but if readers can’t easily locate a site’s content, its sunk! Google XML Sitemaps helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com better index and access information on blog pages.

Number 3: Advanced WP Columns — With computer monitor screens getting bigger at the same time screens on portable devices are getting smaller, the option to column text on a page may be one way to make content more accessible, regardless of what device is used. Advanced WP Columns allows bloggers to present their content in multiple columns.