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 »

If you are looking to add more functionality and features to your WordPress site, look no further than the thousands of WordPress plugins that are available. Nearly every plugin can be found at the WordPress Plugin Directory, and they are easily searchable and categorized.

The latest versions of WordPress allow you to search for plugins via the Plugins section of the administrator area of your website. Once you find the plugin you want to install, it takes only a few seconds to install and activate it. You don’t need to upload the files anymore! Future plugin updates are processed by the same function.

Here are a few important plugins you should install to any WordPress site:

Akismet – this plugin checks your comments to see if they are spam or not. Read the rest of this entry »