One of the best ways for your visitors to contact you directly is through a Email Contact Form.
A contact form allows you to aid the visitor with specific question topics and then route the email to the appropriate person in your organization.
If you only have one person taking care of your site you can still take advantage of contact forms that direct email to specific email addresses based on the question your visitor needs answered.
You can even setup Auto Responders on your Email Account to automatically send out a message to your visitor when they contact you with basic information that may help them solve their problems.
Advanced use of contact forms can generate a test like environment where your visitor is asked a variety of different questions. The answers can be collected or they can direct the user to different questions based on answers they already completed.
So what is the easiest way to add a contact form to your WordPress Website?
Well the easiest way to get a contact form up and running in under 20 minutes is to install a plugin that provides a basic listing of fields which you can expand on to meet your needs.
For a few years until a recent upgrade of WordPress Core broke it I would use Contact Form7 on all of my sites. It did require an additional plugin for spam checking but it was easy enough to manage and worked well.
Recently I changed to Fast Secure Contact Form it is the one I now use for no other reason then it works.
Read the documentation but basically you build your form fields then insert a [shortcode] tag on your page to display the form.
If you don’t set an email address it will use your default wp email but you can also cc or bcc to another email or just use a different email all together. Obviously your server needs to support php email
Advanced WordPress Contact Form Editing
Once you are happy with your contact form you should modify the CSS Styles for the elements in your form.
By adding different colors, borders, drop shadows and text styles you will be able to make your form more attractive and easier to use for your visitors.
Additionally by editing the widths of your elements you can adjust your text areas so that they better match your layout.
How creative you get will depend on the time that you have to make your form special.
If you simply want your visitors to contact you and you don’t want to deal with spam you can get a contact form working in 20 minutes or so. However if you are making a complicated contact form that directs email to different accounts with auto responders and you take time to adjust your CSS styles you should expect to spend at least an hour and probably more.
Nothing good is easy or fast so plan your use for complex forms and install a default form until your expanded version is ready for use.
