Easily add a Contact Form to your Wordpress Blog

There are numerous reasons to having a contact form on your Wordpress blog.  Users and viewers like interactive enviroments, they like to know that there is some sort of human aspect to a website.  A contact form is a way for them to directly get in touch with the website owner with any questions they may have.  Contact forms are also useful for the site owner because it means they can recieve comments and feedback regarding their content and services from the actual users.

So why don’t you just put your email address on the page and let the users email you themselves?   Well appart from looking pretty unprofessional, it leaves you open to spammers and before you know it your inbox is full of useless junk.  Also with a contact for you can specify certain fields so the site owner can request specific information to best answer their questions.

Creating email contact forms by hand can be very complicated, especially for novice users.  You may need advanced knowledge of programming languages such as HTML, CSS, Ajax and PHP, it can also be extremely time consuming.  So if your using wordpress, there are numerous free plugins out there which allows you to instantly create advanced email contact forms instantly.  Below are some examples:

• cForms II - This is a great plugin and is what we use for this site (check it out on the contact page).  Very easy to use and very easy to install.
• Contact Form 7 - I like this plugin due to its support for CAPATCHA for added security, again very simple to use and install, really is a great plugin without the annoying and useless frills and flares
• Secure & Accessible PHP Contact Form - Developed by Mike Jolley and is a real gem of a plugin, I have been considering switching to this myself.

There are so many out there which do just as good a job but I prefer the three mentioned above and use one of them for 99.9% of my Wordpress blogs.  If you would like to add anything to this post or if you have any suggestions, please get in touch by leaving a comment below or fill in the contact page above.