As noted in Subscribe, Email Mailing List, Blog Update Alerts, and Newsletter WordPress Plugins and WordPress Plugins for Comments from the month long series of WordPress Plugins, there are a lot of ways for you to keep in contact with your blog’s readers. There are also different ways for them to get in contact with you through contact forms.

Blog readers can contact you through your blog comments, through an email address, or through a contact form. A contact form is a popular method as it hides the email address in the form, providing more security. Contact forms can also be set up to alert you that the email comes from your blog and can be set up to ask specific questions, narrowing down the request or question the user might have.

For example, if you are providing technical support for a WordPress Plugin, shareware, freeware, or other software program, you can set the form to ask questions which will narrow down the focus, thus directly the email inquiry to the right person or department to expedite the response. Questions such as “Are you requesting technical support, customer service, or want to say thank you or scream at us, click the appropriate box.” If you have multiple bloggers, some contact forms can be set up to contact the specific blogging author directly.

The most popular and “original” contact form for WordPress was Ryan Duff’s WP-ContactForm. It was simple, easy to use, and did what it needed to do. Based upon this excellent foundation, many WordPress Plugins followed, adding features, improving security, and adding AJAX features to make the process faster.

For those who really loved Ryan Duff’s contact form, Contact Form ][ seems to be a popular replacement.

PXS Mail Form WordPress Plugin added features to the contact form for sending CC (carbon copies), character set (charset) recognition from the blog’s settings for international usage, email address checking, CSS styles from the Administration Panels, referrer checks, multiple recipients from a drop down menu for multiple bloggers, and even sends a copy of the message to the sender, if desired.

Enhanced Contact Form is another “improved” contact form based upon Ryan Duff’s. Additional features include the referring page on the site, original referrer, and other small details that can help you learn more about how the visitor accessed your blog.

Accessible and Secure PHP Contact Form for WordPress is called by the author “accessible, usable, spam-proof, and secure contact form”. Based on the PHP Contact Forms by Mike Cherim, this contact form is designed to be fully protected from spam email harvesters and offers a wide variety of features including styling from the Admin Panels with optional choices build in to style the contact form. It also features a multiple user version for a fee.

Clearskys Enquiry and Contact Form WordPress Plugin creates a form for the visitor to fill in with customizable options to gain more information from the visitor regarding their contact request. This Plugin is designed for businesses offering email customer support, business inquiries, and even booking and reservation requests. It gathers the information needed to make the inquiry or appointment and emails it to the blog administrator.

Cforms WordPress Plugin allows for multiple contact forms throughout your blog, or even more than one contact form on the same page. It uses AJAX, but degrades gracefully for non-AJAX/Javascript browsers. It features a lot of customization and a clean layout.

Other contact form WordPress Plugins for WordPress include:

• Web 2.0 Contact Form By John Wyles
• AJAX Contact WordPres Plugin
• WSR Contact Form for WordPress
• Intouch WordPress Plugin
• Holler WordPress Plugin

Hiding Your Email From Harvesters

Harvesters are web bots which trawl the web looking for email addresses to use for email spam. They find them in the most unsuspecting places, including in your blog. There are a variety of WordPress Plugins which allow you to post your email address, and the emails of others, and “hide” them so they are visible to the reader, clickable for instant emailing from your blog’s page, and yet invisible to email harvesters.

• Email Immunizer
• Anti-Email Spam WordPress Plugin
• EmailShroud WordPress Plugin
• Transpose Email Plugin
• PHPenkoder WordPress Plugin
• eMail Unicode Konverter WordPress Plugin

What do you use for your contact form in your WordPress blog? And are you using something to hide email from harvesters, protecting yourself, your blog authors, and your commenters?

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