As a response to Stephanie’s comment regarding the biggest WordPress issues you had when you first started out blogging, I’m doing this post on adding contact forms to your WordPress blog. On my main blog I’m using Aweber to provide the form for my free ebook give away (Using auto responders). But on my self branded domain I use a free version that has worked wonders and will delight many of you, especially the new bloggers.
The free contact form can be obtained from Response O Matic. Let’s look at what we have to do in order to get our own form:
On the site it states that without having any knowledge of HTML you can create your own form within 8 minutes. Ok, I’m going to take them by their word and sign up with a new ID.
- After I filled out the information I had to confirm this via a confirmation email. As soon as I clicked that link it sent me to the form creation page within Response-O-Matic as seen below:
This first screen will ask you to fill in your name and your email address. Make sure you are using a valid email here.
then click save and continue to step 2
- The next screen (see above) will need some input in regards on where to send your visitors after they filled and submitted the form. I opted to send them to my site, which means you need to type your domain into this field.
- Alternatively you can also send them to your thank you page (not advised for newbies)
- Last tick “email a copy of each form submission to you”. You’ll need this to be notified if someone is trying to contact you.
Then hit save and continue to step 3
- Last but not least, simply copy and paste this code into a new WordPress page on your blog. I suggest you name the page “contact us” for obvious reasons. When you do the copy and paste make sure to do this in code version of your WordPress editor. See how I have done this below:
- Don’t forget to click publish when you are all done and this will give you an straightforward no bells and whistles contact form absolutely free.
- See how it looks on my blog: A note on this, I actually added the code into my sidebar when I started that blog so your contact form would look a little different on your page, but still sufficient.
That’s it, you are done. The only thing I recommend is to test it straight away. You should receive an email alert in your inbox stating that “you” submitted a contact form regarding “whatever”.
As for the time it took me to complete the whole thing, including adding the code to my blog and publishing it it was a whopping 10 minutes.
BTW, Response-O-Matic only allows you to create one free form per email address. Oops, did I say something wrong? 
Brian's Threaded Comments Plugin
If you are after a cool looking and user friendly comment Plugin, then Brian’s Threaded Comments Plugin will no doubt do the job for you. This Plugin is not only great to help your visitors navigate your comments easier, but it also helps to attract more comments because of this functionality.
What this Plugin does is giving you or your visitors the opportunity to reply to each comment on your blog in a threaded fashion. So instead of having to look for every persons comment and then address them individual at the end, you can now address each person directly below their comment. You can see how the structure works from the above screen shot.
Brian’s Threaded Comments Plugin will slightly alter your database by adding an additional column. This won’t affect your WordPress performance except in a few minor cases. You are best off to read the information regarding bugs and capabilities on Brian’s Plugin page.
Since installing this Plugin myself about 1 week ago I find it so much easier to reply to my readers comments. The Plugin allows for easier navigation on return visits and helps both the blog owner and the reader.
To download Brian’s Threaded Comments Plugin click on the link.