Technical Setup – Contact Form & Archives Page

How to Create a Contact Form

It is surprising how many bloggers there are that do not have a contact form on their blog. But why would you want one? Well if you want to market something, either yourself, your services, a brand or even a product ? anything, you will need some way for those that are interested to be able to contact you. Unfortunately, these days spam is a big problem so publishing your email address online is probably the last thing you want to do. A contact form will allow people to reach you via email but will keep your email address 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 setup, you still need to create the form itself. You can use a WordPress post or a page. All you need to do is put the following text in the body of the page and when it is displayed on your site the text will be replaced by the actual form: %%wpcontactform%%

And that is all there is to it! One last note, make sure you test your form by sending an email to yourself

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 you have installed the plugin you will find a new option called ‘SRG Clean Archives’ from the ‘Settings’ menu. There are a few checkboxes that allow you to tweak the output but I find the defaults 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.

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.

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Filed under: Blog Marketing

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