The best thing about WordPress, to me, is the vast selection of plugins, nearly all of them free, that one can use in a WordPress site. Not to mention all of the themes and templates that are easily added with a few clicks of the mouse, giving you a professional, custom-look site for very little time and money.

Here are my favorite and most recommended WordPress plugins:

Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Fast and Secure Contact Form: Fast and Secure Contact Form for WordPress. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. Does not require JavaScript.

Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

HeadSpace2: Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.

Redirection: Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors

Reveal IDs for WP Admin: Reveals hidden IDs in Admin interface that have been removed with WordPress 2.5 (formerly known as Entry IDs in Manage Posts/Pages View for WP 2.5).

Robots Meta: This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

SEO Slugs: Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.

ShareThis: Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Smart YouTube: Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization.

WordPress.com Stats: Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

For themes, I almost exclusive use the StudioPress themes by Brian Gardner (this site uses his Corporate Theme), available here:

StudioPress.com