I’m surprised at the amount of bloggers that don’t have a contact form anywhere on their blog. Why would you want one? Well if you are marketing something, whether it is yourself, your services, a product, a brand – anything at all, you need a way for interested parties to contact you but these days spam is a real problem so the last thing you’d ever want to do is publish an email address online. A contact form allows people to contact you via email whilst keeping the email hidden away on the server.
You can create a form manually using HTML but there’s no need to go to those lengths unless you need something specific. If all you need is a simple way for your visitors to send you a message then I recommend the great WordPress plugin from The Marketing Technology Blog.
Once installed login to your WordPress dashboard, click the ‘Settings’ link and you will see a new option called ‘Contact Form’. Click this to bring up the contact form editor.
It will ask you to give your email address to send the mail to, but don?t worry, this will remain hidden from your visitors. It will also ask for a subject line and some standard messages. You also have the option to create a question for your visitors to answer in order to avoid spammers.
Once this is all set up, you then need to create the form itself. You can use a WordPress post or page. You simply need to type %%wpcontactform%% in to the body of the page and once it is displayed on your blog, the text will be replaced by the actual form.
That?s all there is to it! I would recommend, however, that you send yourself a message via your form to test that it works!
Archives Pages
WordPress does have built-in archives features but they will only show the full post, it provides no simple way to merely see a contents table at a glance. Luckily, plug-ins come to our rescue yet again. There is a great one at idunzo.com.
What this plug-in does is it creates a single page that can display a single link for each post. It groups the links by months and can also show how many comments were received for each post.
Once you have installed the plugin you will find a new option called ‘SRG Clean Archives’ from the ‘Settings’ menu. There are a few checkboxes that allow you to tweak the output but I find the defaults fine.
The process to make the archives page is very similar ? you have a piece of text to put in which will get replaced by the actual archives output once the page is published. There is one subtle difference however ? you will have to type the text in the HTML view of the page and not the Visual view.
The text you need to type is: <!–srg_clean_archives–>
This is an HTML tag (or a comment) and so must be input in the HTML view. If it is typed in the visual view then that?s exactly what will be shown on the page when it?s output.
