One of the things that every business website must have is an easy way for the visitor to contact you.
A telephone number and email address are obvious ways, but not everyone is a) going to phone you and b) going to copy and paste your email address into their email client, especially if it means opening another browser tab and logging into something like Gmail, or whatever.
So, it is always a good idea to have a contact form on your website to make it easy for the visitor to send you a message with their enquiry.
With WordPress, one of the best and most widely used contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
It is really easy to set up and just as easy to create a page with your contact form on it. To install Contact Form 7, go to your WordPress Dashboard and on the left menu go to Plugins -> Add New.
Next, in the search box, simply type Contact Form 7 and click the Search Plugins button.
A list of plugins will appear, with Contact Form 7 at the very top.
Click on the Install Now link, just below the plugin name.
When it is installed, click on the activate button.
You will notice that there is a new item in the left menu called Contact.
Click on it and you will be taken to the administration page.
At the top, click on Add New.
A new form editor will be shown.
Under the heading form, you will see an editor on the left side that contains a set of default fields.
If you are familiar with HTML you can modify the form by hand, or you can use the Tag generator on the right side of the screen.
To use the Tag generator, click on the down arrow and select the new tag that you want to use.
For instance if you want the visitor to add a telephone number, you can select telephone from the list.
Once you have selected the field you want, a new set of shortcodes will appear.
Copy the code in the brown area and paste it into the form on the left.
For the form field to appear on a different line to the other form fields and to tell the visitor what to put in the field you will have to add a small bit of HTML to the form, like this.
<p>Your phone number<br />
[tel tel-457]</p>Now, scroll down the page and make sure you fill in the Mail To field with your email address, if you don’t the email will go nowhere!
You should also past the telephone code into the message body box, on the right.
This is the message that you will receive when a visitor fills in your form.
Now, save your new form.
Next, select and copy the code at the top of the screen, in the brown bar.
You will now need to create a new Page and copy that code into it.
Once the Page is created and published you will have a fully functioning contact form on your website.
And there it is, 5 minutes to a contact form on your website.