Blog Setup – Part 2 – Your Contact Page

Video Transcript

In this class, we’re going to create our contact page, so let’s go ahead and login to our Admin area, which I’ve already done here. And over here on the sidebar we’re going to go to pages, add new, just like we did with our creating of our about page.

And here in the add title box we’re going to go ahead and name it, name it something like contact or contact us. We’re gonna leave everything else alone for the time being, just titling it and then publishing it. That’s all we’re going to do for now. Now we’re going to add our contact plugin, so we go to plugins, add new and appear in the search plugins box type in contact. I’m going to be using the WP forms plugin, but you can use whatever you want. Now there’s other training on the use of plugin, so I’m going to leave the install and complete setup of the contact form plugin to you.

But once you have the plugin installed, usually there will be a line of code or what’s called a short code. You can copy from the plugin settings and add your contact page. Now different contact forms will have different settings, but the goal of this class remember is to start a blog, not contact form settings. Let’s go ahead and go to the process of setting up our WP forms plugin. Install now and activate and as soon as you activate this particular plugin, you’re going to get this welcome page, little tutorial video and a button. I’m going to go ahead and click on that says create your first form and we’ve got some different form templates. I’m just going to go with the simple contact form, clicking on that button and I’m going to leave everything in the default settings just as they are. Come on up here and click on save and then embed.

That’s going to give me the short code I was referring to earlier. I’m just going to copy all that into my clipboard. Close this out, hit the x up in the top right corner to close this out and then we’re going to come on back to our contact us page. Open that and the editor. Then in the block just under the title, we’re going to go ahead and add a short code block and if you don’t see it, go ahead and type in the search box short code, but it’s right here so I’m just going to grab that and then paste that code in here and then update. Let’s go ahead and view our contact page and our browser and there it is. There’s our basic contact page. It’ll work for what we need. Now that we have both are about and contact pages created, we need to make them easily accessible to our readers by adding them to our menu.

Now I already have a basic menu created political into our Admin area and why you can’t get to the menus here. I want to show you the long way. We just go back to our dashboard and under appearance in the fly out. That’s what we’re looking for menus. Now if you do not yet have a menu created, then your page is going to look different than this one. It’s very simple, straightforward. There’s additional training on menu creation and customization, but for this demonstration, if your menu is Nyack created, first step is give your menu a name, then save it. Then under pages you want to check the boxes of all the pages that you want to add your menu. And if you’re not seeing like for example the homepage, click on view all, then check the homepage and any other pages that you want to add.

Like for example the about me and contact us pages that we just created, I already have them. Then you created in the home page is already there. So all I need is to check the boxes for about me and contact us. Click on add to menu and if you’re going to do some customizations you can do that here. But again, that’s covered in greater detail in the menus class you only. Other thing is I want to make sure that all of these are going to be on my top menu, so I make sure that box is ticked and then click on save menu. So again, if you do not have a menu created, give your menu a name that can be anything you want. Main menu one like I’ve got here, George, whatever you want to call it, and then save it. That gets your structure created, the that you’ve got the structure created, then you add the pages.

Then save it again and we’re done. Let’s come on back to our homepage and right now we just have the home link showing we want to refresh and there we go homepage and then the about me page and the contact us page and there we have it.

We’ve created our about and contact us pages and added them to our site’s menu. We now have a bit of the groundwork laid out for us to begin writing our blog post. And don’t worry about writing the perfect post because unless you’re a professional writer, then you will learn as you do more posts over time, you’ll develop your own voice or style. And that along with the content is what your readers will want and look forward to on every new posts that you, right now, in the next class on starting a blog, we’re going to cover things like post comments and dealing with the possible spam from those comments.

And maybe sprinkle on a little bit about social sharing. And that’s gonna bring us to the end of this class on the creation of our contact page. We’re going to need to start our blog. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.