Last weeks cool little tool, CryptX, is a great way to put an email address on your website without letting the spammers get a hold of it. However, sometimes you really just want a way for your website visitors to reach out and say hello (or something else) without ever giving out your email address. Contact forms let your visitors do just that.
For a WordPress website, you have a lot of choices, but the top two, in my opinion, are Contact Form 7 and Fast Secure Contact Form. I recommend these two contact forms anytime I'm asked about contact forms. I use both of them (on different websites, of course) and thing both of them do an excellent job of collecting user info, blocking spam (through captcha,) and making your life as webmaster an easy one.
Before we get into the features, let's talk price. Both are free. Yep, 100% free. Sure, they'll take donations, but neither uses nagware or any other ploy to get you to donate.
Going alphabetically ...
Contact Form 7
Find it by searching the plugins section of your dashboard or by going to http://contactform7.com.
With a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars and over 24 million downloads, I see that I'm not the only person who loves this contact form. Installation is extremely easy. About all you need to do is type the send-to email address and cut & paste the short code onto your contact page. If you don't already have Really Simple CAPTCHA (another WordPress plugin by the author of Contact Form 7,) you'll need to install that, too, in order to make use of the spam blocking features.
The handy plugin features the ability to have multiple contact forms (you could put one on each employee's profile page or maybe one on the tech support page and another on the sales page) so you can route website visitor contacts to the correct people or departments.
While it's not quite as full featured as our next contact form, it will do what 98% of the people need it to do. Because it is fairly simple and straight forward, the good news is that you won't spend hours trying to tweak it.
Fast Secure Contact Form
Similarly, find it by searching the plugins section of your dashboard or by going to http://www.fastsecurecontactform.com.
With 4.5 stars out of over 5 million downloads, lots of people obviously love this one, too. It's a little more complicated than Contact Form 7, but with that complication comes a number of other features like allowing files to be uploaded (please be careful if you choose to do this) and highly flexible customization of the form layout. CAPTCHA is included in the plugin, so you don't need a second plugin to handle that.
Like Contact Form 7, Fast Secure Contact Form also allows you to have multiple forms on your website.
While I've never used vCita, it does interface with the vCita online scheduling software, which seems like a pretty cool bonus feature.
The Quick Takeaway
Basically, if you just need a contact form for visitors to send you a note, Contact Form 7 will do that quickly and easily. If you need to collect anything more complicated (maybe along with a simple contact form, ) then Fast Secure Contact Form is the way to go.