Contact Forms
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 to create the archives page is similar. You put in a piece of text which then gets replaced by the actual archives output when the page is published. There is a subtle difference however ? you need to type this text in the HTML view of the page rather than 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 to create the archives page is similar. You put in a piece of text which then gets replaced by the actual archives output when the page is published. There is a subtle difference however ? you need to type this text in the HTML view of the page rather than 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.
About the Author:
Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She shows you how to make money blogging and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.
