It’s generally not a good idea to post your email address “as is” on your website. Spammers use programs called “bots” to scour the web and collect email addresses, to which they then send massive amounts of spam email.

Instead, create a separate “Contact Me” page and add a contact form where your visitors can easily send email directly to you, without exposing your email address. Of course, some spammers have bots that fill out these forms, but that’s much more rare and isn’t as big of a concern.

Here’s how:

  1. Install the contact form plugin. Download Contact Coldform and unzip the file. Upload the unzipped folder to your plugins directory (usually at /wp-content/plugins). In WordPress, go to the “Plugins” tab and click “activate” next to the entry for “Contact Coldform”.
  2. Create a new page called “Contact Me”. At the top of the WordPress administration dashboard, select “Manage” and then “Pages”. Click “Create a new page”, type “Contact Me” in the “Title” space, and add some text asking your readers to send you email using the form.
  3. Add the Contact Form to your page. At the place where you want the form to appear, add this code: <! — coldform — >(if you’re using the Wordpress visual editor, make sure to click the “Code” tab before entering the Coldform code).
  4. Configure Coldform. Go to the “Options” tab and select “Coldform”. Fill out the form and click the “Update” button at the bottom. Other than your name and email address, you can easily use the defaults for most options.
  5. That’s it. The new page should appear in the site’s menu automatically, and when you visit that page, the contact form will appear. If you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add some form-specific style information to your stylesheet, but the form default form is pretty good. Or use a Coldform skin from the website — cut and paste the code into the style.css entry in WordPress (go to “Presentation” and select “Theme Editor”; scroll to the bottom and paste in the code for your skin; hit “Save Changes” and you’re done.