In this section we’ll setup your site with one one of those useful contact forms to allow visitors to reach you. These are nice for a couple of reasons:

Your email address is hidden from spammers who use automation to harvest emails from websites.

Many people use webmail (such as Hotmail, Gmail) and cannot click on an email link and often get confused how to proceed

To create our form we are going to make use of a plugin called Contact-7. There are many form plugins out there but this one is relatively simple, tried and true. So let’s install it! Check out the “Adding a new plugin” section of this eBook and search for “Contact 7”, install and activate it.

Once installed, the next step is to create a basic contact form. This plugin will let you create as many forms as desired but for now we’ll just start with a simple one.

Create a new Page using the “Add New” entry under “Pages”. Title your page “Contact Us” or something appropriate.

In the body of the article just type the following:

[contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"]

Now save your page. Go to the public side and you should have a “Contact Us” menu entry somewhere which will load your new contact form.

The contact form can be modified using the “Contact Form 7” entry under the “Tools” menu. You can add many options including a security code to prevent automated submissions. Feel free to experiment and read more about it here: http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/contact-form-7/

The email that the result of the form go to is the email associated with your Wordpress user – i.e. the one that you used when you signed up for Dreamhost. You can change this email by going to “Contact Form 7” under the “Tools” menu. You’ll see it somewhere down the page. Don’t forget to save and you changes and send yourself a test email.

Overview

Plugins (see “Wordpress plugin” definition for more info) can also be found on the Wordpress site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and are organized by keyword/tags – check out the left sidebar for a list of popular tags. I have also made a list of useful plugins.

Managing existing plugins

To view your existing plugins, click on “Plugins” in the left sidebar menu of admin. This will show you a list of all installed plugins (active and inactive).

Adding a new plugin

Clicking on the “Plugins” sidebar menu entry will display a drop down where you will see a link called “Add New” on the side menu. This will allow you to search and install plugins, both directly from the Wordpress site or from your computer in case you’ve previously downloaded a plugin from another site.