By default, your WordPress-powered blog is designed to provide “previous” and “next” links at the bottom of the page, allowing your readers to fumble their way through your archive of blog posts. This isn’t too much trouble if they only want to go back a page or two, but what if they want to dive five, ten, or a hundred pages into your history? This can create for a fair bit of user frustration.

Lester Chan has a great WordPress plugin that alleviates this very concern, providing your blog with the ability to show numbered pages for navigation purposes. This is similar to what you get when you encounter a longer thread in a forum, letting you jump from the first page to the third page by clicking on the number three. Instead of having the simple “previous” and “next” links at the bottom of the page, you’ll get a series of numbers. You can also define exactly how many of these numbers are displayed, so you don’t get all cluttered.

Installation and setup are fairly straightforward. After downloading the appropriate zip file and uncompressing its contents, you upload this content to the plugins folder on your WordPress installation via FTP. From there, you activate the plugin from your WordPress dashboard and customize the settings from the provided user interface panel. You can define the text for the current page, the first post, the last post, and so forth.

Check out LesterChan.net for more information, including screenshots and the installation file.