Adding a Contact Form to Blogger and Google Sites

As I've made the switch from Self-hosted WordPress to Google's Blogger and Google Sites (still making the switch for several sites), I've had to learn a new way of doing things, workarounds, and accepting that somethings are not possible.

One issue that I discovered was the lack of a contact form (or any forms) for Blogger and Google Sites. With WordPress, I had installed one of several good third party plugins that would email whatever address was set with the form info. It was a bit of set up, but it all worked ok.

Since Blogger has few plugins and Google Sites only accepts Gadgets, it seemed difficult until I realized that I could embed a Google Docs form to either Blogger or Google Sites.

If you have a Google account, go to Google Docs and create a new form, add questions, make required the questions that are important like e-mail and name, save it and then embed the iframe code in a new page in Blogger or Google Sites.

To get notifications, view the form in Google Docs so you see the spreadsheet (results) view. To the right in the menu bar, click on SHARE and then SET NOTIFICATION RULES.

In the new pop-up, select the check box (or tick it if you prefer!) "A user submits a form"

You have the option below that for "right away" or "daily digest". If you get a lot of spam in your form, change it to daily digest.

The form at Google Docs could be more useful than a plugin if you have several related websites where people might contact you for the same information. You could use the same form on all of those related sites and have the contact information in the same spreadsheet.

Of course you could also make a form in Google Docs for other things like polls and surveys.

The only bad thing about the forms is the lack of an option to upload attachments so if you need to get a document either have them submit the url or tell them you'll send them a message so they can reply with the attachment. It is possible that you could accept an attachment though a Google Gadget attached to a form, but I haven't yet experimented with those options.
Click on my Contact Us page to see my Google Form.