How to Create a Contact Form

You would be surprised at just how many bloggers don?t have a contact form on their blog. But why would you want or need one? Well if you are trying to market something, be it yourself, your services, a product or even a brand ? anything at all, you are going to need some way for your potential customers to be able to contact you. Unfortunately with the amount of spam around these days, it is unwise to publish your email address online. A contact form, however, means that your visitors can contact you with an email even though your actual email address remains hidden away on the server.

You could use HTML to manually create a form but there?s really no need to go to such lengths unless you want something very specific. If you only need a straightforward way for your readers to send a message to you, then The Marketing Technology Bog?s WordPress plug-in is ideal.

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 setup, you still need to create the form itself. You can use a WordPress post or a page. All you need to do is put the following text in the body of the page and when it is displayed on your site the text will be replaced by the actual form: %%wpcontactform%%

And that is all there is to it! One last note, make sure you test your form by sending an email to yourself

How to Make an Archives Page

WordPress has built-in archives features but they show the full posts and there is not an easy way to see just a table of contents at a glance. Thankfully plugins come to the rescue once again and by far my favourite is the 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 installed, the plug-in will give you a new option called ?SRG Clean Archives? within the ?Settings? menu. There are several checkboxes which allow you to adjust the output, but in many cases the default settings are just 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.

This is what to type in: <!–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.