Blogging is all about connecting with your readers.
If you want to be a better blogger, you need to listen to your readers. You need to give them an opportunity to get in touch with you.
That’s why it is important to have a ‘Contact Me’ page in your blog. A ‘Contact Me’ or ‘Send Your Feedback’ page not only makes your blog look professional, but will also make you understand your readers better, help you in getting a lot of tips from them and ultimately will make you a better blogger in the long run.
Unfortunately, a Blogger blogspot blog neither has a Contact-Me page out of the box nor any ready made Contact-Me widgets like the many plugins available in the WordPress arena.
But, have you seen our Send Tips page? It has been done using Zoho Creator. In today’s post we teach you how to create a similar form for your blog. Read along.
To make a Feedback/Contact Me page for your blog, we are going to use Zoho Creator. Though there are multiple options available like response-o-matic, freedback, wufoo and google docs, we are going to use Zoho Creator. Why?
Because:
- Zoho Creator is free
- Zoho is a reputed company and will not burst in a dot com bubble any time soon.
- No separate user account is needed. If you have a Google account (obviously, you do own a Google account if you are blogging in Blogger), then you can use it to log into Zoho.
- The input form that you create is highly customizable. The flexibility in customizing the form is much greater than Google Forms. Hence you can easily blend this form with the rest of your blog.
- You can configure Zoho to email you the contents that user submitted. Therefore, you don’t have to login to Zoho’s web site ever after.
- Zoho provides many ready made scripts which provides many added functionality. Like for instance, if you have added an email field in the form, you can configure it to check whether the email that the user entered is a valid email or not.
Let’s dive right in. Go ahead and watch this video.
Visti Zoho Creator and get started.
Doubts, questions, queries, suggestions? Post a comment.
I liked this idea until I tried to put in into action. I can't seem to find a way to change the text colour. The page I want to put it on has a dark blue background and I use white text. The black text does not work. I tried to solve the problem by placing the code into a table and changing the table background to white. It works but looks sloppy. The border of white around the contact me box is not uniform.
@Joe Vautour,
Currently zoho supports only customization of the border and title colors.
Maybe someone at zoho will notice this blog post and take up your request as a new feature addition later on. :)
Cool tip Anoop :)
@Joe Vautour
We have this feature -'changing the text color' in our roadmap. In our next release we will make the form background as white (right now its transparent), so hope that will your problem I guess.
Thank you Anoop for covering Zoho Creator.
@Raffic,
Making form background white will not solve the problem. It will make the matter worse. It will break a lot of site having non-white backgrounds. Zoho forms will appear ugly in such sites.
The proper solution would be to give the user option to customize the text color similar to the border and title color.
I created the contact form but when I put it into my blog, the form is too big. I tried editing the html to adjust the size but all that does is cut off the side of the form.
Any suggestions?
@lonestar818,
try adding a negative margin for the form. This will prevent the clipping of the form at the right.
Just enclose the form in <div style="margin-left: -30px; "> and </div>
A much easier way to do this is to simply make a "Contact" page and bury it in your blog, then simply make a link on the main page that will take your visitors to the "Contact" page.
Dear Anoop,
In Zoho Creator 3.0 we are supporting color customization and lots of other stuffs while embedding. Kindly check it out and share your feeback with us.
Thanks
Raffic
Thanks for this! Exactly what I was looking for.
Interesting to see that a video makes it actually more difficult for the reader/viewer (stop the video, rewind, try to decipher what is written, etc.). Is it easier to author than a text?
@Carsten,
Video is not easier to author, but actually it's a lot of pain.
I think it's worth the pain because a lot of people have expressed positive reviews towards the attempt.
Thanks for this wonderful video.
.
This is a cool stuff. I really amazed by the idea,
I tried with http://kontactr.com to create instant Contact Me form for my Blogger.
However I found both ways are amazing.....
Great work Anoop.....Keep it up with nice works.
i have created the contact page . its working fine .. thanx for sharing.. keep it up...
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I would like to be able to control the background color of the entire iframe, and not just for the form part. I can do this for firefox using style="background-color: yellow" within the iframe tags, but this doesn't work for internet explorer. I believe it has to be set on the page being called by the iframe. I haven't been able to do it yet playing with the zoho settings. Is this an option?
Thanks for this idea!!! It was helpful!!
Check out my Indian Recipe blog:
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nice post
thanks ur information
it very useful
nice information .. thanx for sharing.. keep it up ....
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nice post
Thank you for this post!
Zoho Creator is a awesome robust tool. However, I don't need all of those features. So, I opted to use anyInput.com to store my lists, it's simple and more easier to use. It is between a full featured database and a simple list maker. My 50 cents.
nice stuff...
I'm used it now, thanks!
my blog: http://just-ash.blogspot.com
Thanks, I've been looking for something like this on my blog, which I just got a domain name for, I'm happy now. Thanks:)
http://www.mycraftthingies.com
Google Docs can be used for this page.
See Following:
http://urenjoy.blogspot.com/2009/04/create-contact-me-page-in-blogger-using.html
Ok it works fine with me.
http://noworkingmoney.blogspot.com/2009/05/contact-me.html
Thanks for the video !! :D
Thank you! I was using EmailMeForm and it just didn't offer what I wanted, but this is perfect. Great resource in Zoho and great tutorial. Thanks a lot..
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