How to Create 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 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.
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!
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 it does is to create a single page that displays just a single link for each post. It groups the links into months and you can also show the number of comments each post received.
Once the plug-in is installed you will see a new option called ?SRG Clean Archives? in the ?Settings? menu. There are several checkboxes allowing you to tweak the output but you may find that the defaults are 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.
The text you need to type is: <!--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.
