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 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 is all there is to it! One last note, make sure you test your form by sending an email to yourself :-)
Setting Up 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 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 you should 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 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 is all there is to it! One last note, make sure you test your form by sending an email to yourself :-)
Setting Up 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 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 you should 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 written 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.
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