Add a Contact Form to Blogger

One of the shortcomings of Blogger against WordPress is the native support for contact form, there are various contact form plugins available for self-hosted WordPress blogs while WordPress.com allows users to add contact forms just by using the tag [contact form]. However, despite this disadvantage, all is not lost for Blogger.

Bloggers on the Blogger platform can actually host their own HTML form in any of their blog post, but they would need to link to an external PHP or CGI script to process the form and send an email containing user-inputs to their own email accounts.

You can of course host your own external PHP or CGI scripts if you have your own hosting to play with. However, there are a large number of users on Bloggers who do not have their own hosting. Besides, it would be troublesome to code a script to handle forms anyway, so I would recommend using third-party services to accomplish the task of adding a contact form to Blogger blogs.

There are various third-party services to help you with this task and most of them are free too. For example, feel free to check out Contactify, FormSpring and Response-o-matic. You are free to choose the service that suits you the most, and you can present your contact form in different ways according to situations. Here are a few ways to present your contact form on Blogger:

• Embed it in a blog post (you can link to this post on your navigation bar with the anchor “Contact Us”)
• Present it in a pop-up window (again you can put a link to this from navigation bar or anywhere in your blog posts)
• Put a link to an externally hosted form (this happens if you use Contactify, you can choose to open this in an external window or a pop-up window too)

I will not being going into the specifics of how to sign up with those third-party services and how to use the code of the forms on your Blogger blogs, you will find those instructions on the links I provided above.

Not all of the third-party services are equal, some are simple and sufficient for basic use while others are more powerful and for a monthly subscription fee, you can actually use various types of forms for different purposes such as accepting orders from clients and doing surveys.

No doubt bloggers using Blogger have disadvantage such as not having the ability to upload external Javascript files on its server and not having native support for a contact form but as demonstrated earlier, bloggers who require extra functionalities can always look towards third-party supports. Bloggers who need to use Javascript functions can upload external files to other free servers and there are now ways to replace the commenting system of Blogger to a better one.

Do you feel disadvantaged using Blogger for your blogs? Do you wish to have extra functionalities currently not found on Blogger? What are the tasks that you found difficult to accomplish with Blogger and wish that there are solutions to your problems? Share with us your problems, and who knows, one of our many authors and webmasters here might just have the perfect solutions for your problems.

BobbyT is a 23-year-old blogger, freelance writer and internet marketeer wannabe. You can visit his blog at http://bobbytoat.blogspot.com