Contact Forms
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 manually create a form with HTML but that?s quite a lengthy process and there is really no need unless you want something specific. If all you want is an easy way for your visitors to get a message to you, then the WordPress plug-in, available at The Marketing Technology Blog is great.
Once it is installed, from your WordPress dashboard go to ?Settings? to find a new option called ?Contact Form?. Click on this option to reach the contact form editor.
You’ll need to fill in the email address to send the email to (don’t worry, this is hidden), a subject line for the email, and some standard messages. You can also put in a question that your visitor must type in to avoid spammers.
Once this is set up, you will still need to create the form itself. You can use a WordPress page or post. All you have to do is to type %%wpcontactform%% in to the body of the page, then when it is displayed on your website, the text will be replaced by the actual form.
And that?s all you have to do! It is wise though, to ensure it is working correctly by sending yourself a message from the form.
Setting Up Archives Pages
There are built-in archives features within WordPress, but they will show the full post and there isn?t an easy way to just see a contents table at a glance. Fortunately, plug-ins come to our rescue again with my favourite being 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 for making the archives page is similar - you have a piece of text to insert which gets replaced by the actual archives output when the page is published. However there is one subtle difference - you have to type in the text in the HTML view of the page, and not in 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.
Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She demonstrates how to make money blogging and provides free downloads of her free guides & courses.
