If you’ve ever wanted to add a contact form on your blog, but didn’t know how or thought it was to much work, then cforms is exactly what you need.

cforms is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to easily create contact forms on your blog. This is important as you want your users to be able to interact with you. This will help make the blog more personalble and friendly plus give your users the ability to contact you with items you may be interested in, problems they come across or inquire about your services.

cforms features include:

• Supports multiple forms.
• Customize each form with it’s own fields and receiver or recievers.
• No HTML knowledge required.
• CSS Themes.
• Submits via AJAX with a fall back to normal POST if necessary.
• WYSIWYG button for easy implementation into any post.
• Upload features.
• Customizable thank you message or ability to redirect to a specific page/post.
• Autoresponders.
• Email messages can be customized with variables from form.
• Easy Install.
• Spam Protection.
• Database keeps all contacts.
• Plus More…

FeedBurner is the only service (that I know of) that will re-publish a blogs feed in order to get feed stats. Being such a great service, many users use it only to figure out how many readers their blogs have. However, FeedFlare is a great addition to any FeedBurner feed as it builds interaction and social media links into each post.

FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build “interactivity” into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item.

To enable FeedFlare, login to your FeedBurner account, go to the Optimize tab then choose FeedFlare from the left column. You can then check items that you want to display in your feed.

I suggest adding at least the following:

• Email This - Send the post via email to a friend or a co-worker.
• Comments Count - You may be able to increase click thoughs if people know there are comments on your post.

Now that you are searching everything on your blog, it’d be a good idea to know what others are searhing for. If you are running Wordpress, this is easy enough to do with the Search Meter plugin.

Search Meter’s job is to capture anything put into the search box. This information is then displayed on the admin side of Wordpress. It also comes with the functionality to output it on the public side of your blog if you’d like to.

Knowing what your visitors are searching for is important as it’s a clue to how they are using the site. You may find out that everyone is searching for information on a certain topic. If it’s not something you post on often, it may be a good idea to post on it more often. Or maybe you’ve created a tutorial or plugin that isn’t easily accessible from your main navigation. If everyone’s searching for it, it’d be a good idea to modify your navigation so it was easier to find.

By default, Wordpress is setup to search every post. What they don’t tell you is that doesn’t include pages. However, with the Search Everything plugin, you can search pages, posts and more.

No only will Search Everything allow you to include pages in your Wordpress search, but also comments, drafts, attachments and custom meta fields. You get to choose what extra fields you want to include which is good as I have no idea why you’d want to include drafts or un-approved comments.

This is really handy for those that use Wordpress as their website content management system. I’ve used Wordpress not as a blogging platform, but as an easy content management source. Some sites have more pages than posts and searching proves problematic.

Even if you use Wordpress for blogging, like most do, there is probably a good chance that you’ve created some pages. Maybe an about page, content, resources or one of many options. And, all those pages deserve to be part of the internal search.

By installing the Search Everything plugin, not only will the search box look though posts, but pages also and give your visitors better results.

[tags]search-everything,search[/tags]

Post slugs are one item that is commonly overlooked when setting up and writing to a blog. Either they are forgotten about all together, or they aren’t customized for usability sake. Optimized post slugs are not just for search engines, but people too.

The first thing we will talk about is search engines. Post slugs can also be referred to as permalinks. They are basically the URL that makes up the individual post page.

By default, Wordpress atomically uses IDs and not words. Here is an example: http://example.com/?p=52. Now it’s short and simple, but gives no indication of what the page is. What we want to do is turn on custom permalinks.

To enable custom permalinks, log in to the admin area of your Wordpress blog and go to Options -> Permalinks. Then go down to Custom and insert /%post_id%/%postname%/. Granted, you can use one of many different operators to define your post slugs, but I prefer the ID followed by the post name.

The second thing you need to consider is your users. Now that your post slugs are automatically generating URLs that contain words, you should to one step further and customize them per post.

Justin Shattuck has a great post about the things blogs do that he finds annoying. It’s a good read and he points out a lot of good items.

1. Link love, it makes sense
2. Make your content accessible
3. Wow, thats alot of ads
4. Echos are getting old
5. Admins, stop being lazy
6. I know who I am
7. Stop filling forms out for me
8. Direct linking is stealing
9. Snap sucks!
10. So many images, dumb.

When trying to come up with the things that annoy me about blogs I kept coming across the same things. To many ads, to much spam and that echo chamber.

I’ve realized that a lot of these things can be fixed by reading only feeds. 99% of ads are not included in feeds and that’s a magnificent site. On the blogs themselves, I’d rather not block ads as I do find relevant ones helpful at times and I know sites have bills. What I’d rather see are ads that are designed into the content, not a big block of adsense in the middle of the post.

A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a Wordpress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in Wordpress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default Wordpress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

I’ve recently acquired some email campaign tasks and one item I’m always hearing is to get something ‘above the fold’.

Now, I know what above the fold is. It’s the space that the visitors sees on the screen without having to scroll down. Really it’s a term from the newspaper industry where the fold of the newspaper cuts off stories. Those on top get more exposure and those on the bottom of the page.

But now that we are in the web world, it’s not the same. There are many different screen sizes, internet browsers, toolbars and the term ‘above the fold’ just doesn’t seem to fit.

So my question to you is, where is ‘above the fold’ on a computer screen and has it been standardized? Should I assume that 1024×768 is a good size? But then again, how does that work when it comes to emails?

That’s what is on my mind today. What are your thoughts?

[tags]email,email-marketing,email-campaign,above-the-fold[/tags]

One of my pet peeves with blogs is when they require you to login to comment. Why should I have to login? What do I get out of it?

Some blogs do have a lot of visitors and use logins to control un-wanted comments. In this case, I can see logging-in as a way to control quality. However most blogs don’t get thousands of visitors an hour and have no need to require a login.

Lets not get this confused with spam. If you are getting lots of spam, get a spam plugin.

Even worse are those blogs that say ‘You must be logged in to comment’ but you can’t login because you haven’t registered and you can’t register because they never activated that feature on the blog. Then they wonder why they never get comments on their blog.

In my opinion, blog comments should be open to everyone and registration should not be required. If you do need to register, then the user should get additional value out of doing so.

What do you think?

One nice feature in Wordpress is the ability to have a feed for each category. It’s all built in and up-and-running in all Wordpress blogs as we speak. It’s just not promoted.

To get separate feeds for each category, just load the category page and add /feed/ at the end of the URL. That is if they have permalinks turned on.

If you want to add the feeds to your template for easy access for your users, you can just replace the category code in your template with:

WP pre 2.1 -
wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=0&feed=RSS’);

WP 2.1 -
wp_list_categories(’sort_column=name&optioncount=0&feed=RSS’);

Now, instead of it saying Category(14) it says Category(RSS) and RSS will link to the feed

A good marketer will want to know how many people are subscribing to each category feed. To do this you’ll need to run over to Feedburner and start burning each category feed. Then put in a 302 redirect to send all feed traffic to the Feedburner feed.