Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

There are literally millions of blogs out there, and if you haven’t yet noticed, most of them have contact forms – and for good reason. People these days don’t want to just read articles and posts – they want to respond to them and share their own opinions. While some of this can be done through comments, contact forms are good too as they allow readers to directly contact site owners. This can help you, as a webmaster, gather valuable information and ideas from your readers. It also leaves the door open for potential business partners, looking to advertise on your site, or even purchase your entire blog! Regardless of the reason, it’s a good idea to have a contact form on your blog.

Some of you may have a contact form built into your WordPress theme, but if you don’t, there are a number of plugins available that can fix that.

WordPress Contact form plugins

One of the most popular plugins is Contact Form 7. This fairly simple WordPress add-on is available free of charge, and allows you to make a clean, organized contact form for your blog. You set it up by installing it and setting up the form (choosing what fields you want i.e. name, email, message body, etc.), and it does the rest from there on out. When a user fills out the form and clicks submit, the information will immediately be emailed to you. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress is arguably one of the easiest and best ways to get a site or blog off the ground, and millions of webmasters use it. However, since pretty much anyone can build a site with WordPress, there are a lot of mistakes made and quite a few WordPress-based sites that are simply low quality. If you want to make a quality site, be sure to avoid some of the common mistakes described below.

1. Too many ads

WordPress makes it extremely easy to place ad blocks into your site, but that doesn’t mean you should just go ahead and add 10 different ads! Having too many ads looks very unprofessional, and though you’d think it would make you more money, it actually reduces ad revenue in many cases, as visitors get annoyed and leave. To fix this problem, just try to limit yourself to 1-3 ads per page. If you’re trying to increase ad revenue, change the placements of the ads and make them more prominent.

2. Comment spam

WordPress makes commenting on posts extremely easy, which is both a good and a bad thing. Real comments from real people are good, but it is simple for bots and spammers to post spam comments on your blog. Generally WordPress blogs don’t require registration in order to post comments, which means bots don’t have to do much in order to spam. Read the rest of this entry »