Whether you run a blog as part of a bigger business or your blog stands on its own, it’s important that you have an ability to reach out to your audience and they have an ability to reach right back to you. The comment section is one way to do that, but not all communication is intended to be public. That’s why contact forms are so useful.

There are many different contact form plugins available for WordPress, but most require you to create a separate page for the contact form. That’s not the case with the Slick Contact Forms plugin. Instead, it uses jQuery and AJAX so the contact form can be rendered on any page. There is no page refresh needed.

The contact form can simply float or drop down as a tab. If you prefer, it can aslo be a sticky, slide-out tab. In any case, the contact form can be placed as a widget at all kinds of places around the web and includes three text input fields, as well as a text intro. To fight spam, it uses a “honeypot” mechanism with a blank input field hidden to users but visible to spambots. This is more streamlined that a Captcha-style system.

Learn more about the Slick Contact Forms WordPress plugin on Design Chemical, which is the site of the people responsible for the plugin. Screenshots, installation instructions, a live demo, shortcode information, and the free download link can all be accessed from that page.

There are many different ways that you can go about displaying your blog. Some people like to have the full text visible right from the main page and main archive, much like what you see here on the BlueFur blog. However, for blogs with longer posts, this may not be as appropriate.

Depending on the theme that you are using, there may already be an automatic function to create excerpts, but this may not be the case. That’s why something like the Auto Read More Generator plugin can be so simple and so useful.

It serves a single function. For every post that you publish, it will automatically insert a “read more…” link after the first image and first paragraph. If there is no image, then the “read more…” link will be placed after the first paragraph. This creates the excerpt and streamlines the main page.

You can find the Auto Read More Generator through the WordPress Plugin Directory as normal. And also as normal, this plugin is available as a free download too.

In an effort to provide the best possible user experience on your blog, you may have added a series of widgets for more functionality and easier access. However, this may have had a significantly negative impact on the load times for your pages.

This is especially true when it comes to widgets that rely on external data sources, like an Amazon shopping widget or a Facebook page widget. To help improve the reader experience, you may want to consider adding the Lazy Widget Loader plugin for WordPress.

In short, this widget will “postpone loading the content of those widgets you choose, so that the their content is loaded after the main content of the page that is displayed.” By doing this, the main content is there and accessible, rather than being delayed behind the slower-loading widgets.

The mechanism allows the loading of any content only when needed, including the ability to “lazy-load” content anywhere on the page. Head on over to Itthinx.com for more information about the Lazy Widget Loader. It’s also there that you’ll find the FAQ, screenshots, demo, and download link.

When you run any kind of blog, it’s important that you update it on a regular basis. This also means that it helps when you have an ongoing list of post topics, ensuring that you always have something to write about.

Saving these topic ideas as “draft” posts, sometimes with some quick bullet points to jog your memory, can be very helpful, but it’s not always convenient to access all your drafts. That’s where the simple yet effective Drafts Dropdown plugin comes into the picture.

Created by Crowd Favorite and Alex King, well known names in the world of WordPress development, Drafts Dropdown grants you faster access to your draft posts and pages. Assuming that you are logged in, you can see the drafts pulldown menu from every page on your blog via that gray toolbar that stays persistent across your site. It’s that simple.

Head on over to the WordPress Plugin Directory to get the FAQ, installation instructions, and screenshots for this plugin. It is also there that you can access the free download link. The current version is compatible with WordPress 3.2+.

Growing a popular blog is very much a double-edged sword. It’s great when you have lots of new readers leaving lots of new comments, but that also means that your site is more likely to attract all the comment spammers and spambots out there.

Akismet has been the go-to tool for this problem for quite some time, but it is not without its flaws. It “detects” many false positives: comments that are legitimate can oftentimes be flagged as spam and never seen by the blog owner. An alternative to Akismet is GASP and it claims to be more accurate in this regard.

Developed by Andy Bailey, the same guy who made the popular CommentLuv plugin, GASP stands for GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin. It works to combat spam from spambots by implementing a very simple feature. There is a checkbox that needs to be ticked before a comment can be posted. The text next to this reads, “Check box to confirm you are NOT a spammer.” Real comments get through and spambots do not.

Check out Basic Blog Tips for more information about GASP. The plugin can then be found as a free download through the usual WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

Blogs are a great way to showcase your latest work as the default configuration uses a reverse chronological order for your content. At the same time, this means older content can easily be lost and forgotten. How can you fix that?

A great WordPress plugin called Top 10 helps draw attention to some of your most popular posts. It keeps track of the page views on your blog, both on a daily basis and with all-time page views. The page view count can be shown on the individual posts themselves, but that’s not where the real value lies.

Instead, it’s much better to output this top 10 list as a widget to be shown in your sidebar or footer. This way, if someone arrives on your site reading one post, he or she will quickly and easily see what other posts are popular on your site. There are many features and options in this plugin too, allowing you to tweak it to suit your needs.

Head over to the developer’s site to get more information about how this plugin works. You can access the free download link on that page or via the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.