How to Set Up Contact Forms & Archives Pages

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 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 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 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.

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

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 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.

This is what you should 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.

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