Setting up a Contact Form
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 you have installed it, log in to your WordPress account, go to your dashboard, click ?Settings? and you will find a new option called ?Contact Form?. Follow this link to bring the contact form editor up.
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
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 will do is create a single page that will display a single link for each post. It will group the links into months and it will also show how many comments each post received.
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 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.
This is what to type in: <!--srg_clean_archives-->
This is actually an HTML tag (a comment) which is why it needs to be input in the HTML view. If you type it into the visual view then this is what you will actually see on your page when output.
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 you have installed it, log in to your WordPress account, go to your dashboard, click ?Settings? and you will find a new option called ?Contact Form?. Follow this link to bring the contact form editor up.
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
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 will do is create a single page that will display a single link for each post. It will group the links into months and it will also show how many comments each post received.
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 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.
This is what to type in: <!--srg_clean_archives-->
This is actually an HTML tag (a comment) which is why it needs to be input in the HTML view. If you type it into the visual view then this is what you will actually see on your page when output.
About the Author:
Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She demonstrates how to make money blogging and gives away free downloads of her free guides & courses.
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