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How to Create 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 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 will have to fill it in with your email address so that mail can be forwarded on to you, but this will remain hidden from your visitors so don?t worry. You will also need to fill in a subject line and some standard messages. It will also give you the option to create a question that your visitors must answer, this helps 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.

That?s all there is to it! I would recommend, however, that you send yourself a message via your form to test that it works!

How to Make an Archives Page

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 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 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 actually is an HTML tag (a comment) which is why you need to input it in the HTML view. If you type it in the visual view then that?s what you will see on your page when it is output.

Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since September 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.