Blogging Tips

Option #1: Wufoo

Wufoo is by far my favorite choice for creating forms for websites, blogs included. They have a free plan which allows you to create three different forms with 10 fields each and receive 100 submits per month. For a lot of bloggers, this is probably fine. If you outgrow that, the pricing plans are very reasonable.

With Wufoo, you design your forms right on their website and then they give you a little code snippet to place wherever you want the form. This is just as easy to embed on a webpage as a YouTube video and we all know you bloggers can do that =). Wufoo can send out notification emails to any email address you want when a new form is submitted and also generate reports based on the data it gathers, you can even subscribe to new entries via RSS.

And these are just SOME of the awesome features of Wufoo. Not only is it feature packed, but it’s easy to use, highly customizable, and the forms are beautiful. They don’t even pay me to write this stuff, I’m just a super-fan, since I bet Wufoo has saved me hundreds of hours of coding my own custom forms.

Option #2: WordPress Plugin

There are also a couple of WordPress plugins to create a contact form. WP-ContactFrom: Aksimet Edition is a good one because it uses the built-in power of Askismet to filter spam submissions. This is a decent solutions because:

• You have “complete control” over your forms
• Dropping a contact form into a post or page is a simple as clicking a button
• There is no limitations on number of submissions

Option #3: Write your own form

It’s not entirely unfeasible to just write you own contact form. I have a good place to start and some downloadable code available here with the Nice & Simple Contact Form. If you are running WordPress, your server is already running PHP, and that’s all this needs to work.