Setting up 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 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.

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 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 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.

Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since September 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She demonstrates how to make money with blogs and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.