So you have a fresh WordPress installation and you are wondering what to do now. Here are a few links that might help you customizing you WordPress installation to your needs, help you get better ranking on search engines and much more. Where to look for hi quality themes, hacks, plugins and a bunch of useful tips. Hopefully it will help you in creating enjoyable and useful WordPress site. Enjoy :)

WordPress themes

It is most likely that you’ll want to change default theme because there are so many really nice themes (and most are free :) ) that default theme is there only for the installation purposes.

Smashing Magazine has put up a list of 100 (!) really great, and free, WordPress themes. Find them here: 100 Amazing Free WordPress themes for 2009 @Smashing Magazine

SpeckyBoys 40 WordPress themes are a delight: 40 Awesome and Fresh WordPress Themes @speckyboy

As always, Six Revisions has made a remarkable post with 40 free WordPress themes: 40 Excellent Free WordPress themes @Six Revisions

On design follow a bit more than 45 themes are presented: 45+ great looking free WordPress Themes @design follow

WordPress plugins

Plugins are really useful, and there is a plugin for every and any thing you can imagine. Here are some links and description of very useful plugins.

The first plugin you should install and configure is Askimet. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

If you want your WordPress site to get ranked on search engines you should install All in one SEO which will optimize your WordPress pages for search engines and you will need Google XML Sitemaps plugin which will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Also I can recommend: FeedBurner (redirect your feeds to FeedBurner.com), Google Analytics for WordPress (monitor your access statistics from your WordPress admin pages), Google Custom Search Plugin (integrate Google search in your WordPress installation), Sociable (easily add to your WordPress pages and posts sharing and social services links) and Twitter Tools (today everybody is on Twitter, isn’t it?).

WordPress hacks

WordPress can be a simple blog engine and it can be much more. Many corporate sites are build on WordPress and it’s likely that you won’t even notice it’s WordPress that is behind it all.

10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks @Smashing Magazine will show you how to create Tiny URL’s on the fly, create a maintenance page, resize images on the fly and much more!

40+ Most Wanted WordPress Hacks you can find @HongKiat.com. An impressive list of some really useful hacks!

Useful tips

How to be a better blogger? How to revive old posts? It’s all here…

4 Ways To Bring New Life To Old WordPress Blog Posts @boagworld

16 WordPress Sites to Help You Build a Better Blog @Six Revisions

WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet @woorkup

10 Useful WordPress Coding Techniques @Smashing Magazine

Do you have a tip or resource  to share? Please do comment :)