My recent post on improving your forms got me thinking about the most common ways to add contact forms to websites and blogs. Given how important it is to offer your visitors a quick and easy way to get in touch with you, having a great contact form is key to a successful site. Here are some solutions I recommend:
WordPress Contact Form Plug-ins
I’d say about 95% of the sites I’ve created lately have been powered by WordPress, so I usually reach for a plug-in for the contact form. The one that hasn’t let me down yet is cforms. It’s easy to use, and very, very powerful. In fact, it might be too powerful for some- and when it is, I recommend checking out Tiny Contact Form, which is simple, gets the job done, and is indeed tiny. Another one to look at is the reCAPTCHA Form, which enables you to have a contact form using the reCAPTCHA challenge system.
Kontactr
This one‘s a hosted solution, which means that they host your contact forms for you, giving you some code to embed in your website or blog. Kontactr is by no means the only service that does this (see another one I like below)- but the reason I like it so much is that it includes CAPTCHA protection. Less spam is always a yay.
Wufoo
Like Kontactr, Wufoo is a hosted form solution, so it makes setting up forms extremely easy and quick. But what I really like about Wufoo is its snazzy styles- they’ve got some seriously good looking form styles here. Their free version includes 3 forms with only 10 fields a form, so for more popular sites you’ll want to upgrade to a paid version.
Contact Form Scripts
If you want complete control over your forms, you’ll probably want to look at installing and using a script. For something commercial, I recommend checking out MachForm, which is powerful and packed with features. An excellent free PHP solution, and one that I’ve used many times for very busy websites is Form Tools. Finally, I can’t talk about contact form scripts without mentioning Dada Mail, a CGI script that I used to use a lot- back in the days before I even knew what PHP was.
How do you power your contact forms?
