All websites should provide a means for the visitor to contact the site owner.
There are many different ways of doing this:
They are:
- Provide physical Address.
- Provide phone number.
- Provide contact email address.
- Provide contact form
Most websites will usually provide all of these on a contact us/about us page.
Providing an email address as text on the page can result in lots of spam, and so the most popular way of allowing email contact is by using a site contact form.
Contact Form Plugins
Because WordPress doesn’t provide this as part of the core functionality it is necessary to use a contact form plugin.
There are many different contact form plugins available for WordPress ranging from very simple contact forms to very feature rich and complex ones.
Strangely enough the more complex contact form plugins like contact form 7, and fast secure contact forms tend to be the most popular.
Very Simple Contact Form
The more feature rich the contact form the more difficult they are to setup.
For most websites a simple contact from is all that is necessary and the Very simple contact form provides just that.
Installing, Configuring and Using The Very Simple Contact Form.
The reason I like this contact form is that it requires zero configuration. You simply
- Install and activate the plugin
- Add the shortcode , shown below
where you want the contact form to appear.
Here is the shortcode added to the about page
This is what appears when viewed by the visitor
Notes:
1. None of the fields in the contact form are changeable.
2. The contact form will be sent to the email address that is set in the main blog settings. Settings>General>E-Mail-Address.
3 You can change the email address by passing it as a parameter in the shortcode. (screen shot below:
Testing the Form
You will need to configure an email client to connect to the mailbox that you are sending the form to.
Then just visit the web page that contains the form and fill in the fields with test data and submit.
Summary
The very simple contact form is a simple no frills contact form suitable for most websites. It doesn’t allow any customisation which is what makes it so simple.
If you want to add multiple forms and customise the form fields etc then you need to look at plugins like ninja forms, fast secure contact forms etc.
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