A few months ago I wrote about How to Add a ‘Contact Us’ Form to Your Site, a mod created by BANS forum member, mistermickster. If you follow those instructions you will end up with a ‘Contact Us’ link in your Site Navigation’s sidebar menu.

After I posted these instructions many people said they prefered to add their ‘Contact Us’ link to the footer of their sites. Both Holly and mistermickster shared how to achieve this. But some people where confused so I am clarifying with detailed instructions here on how to do this.

As I said above, all emails are sent to the address you entered in your site’s Admin Security tab. If you are like me you have entered the same email address for every site you have. You won’t want emails from various sites sent to one email because you’ll have no idea what site the emails are coming from or referring to.

There are several ways to deal with this. The solution I have chosen is a simple one that will allow you to add unique email address for every niche store you have and let you check them all in a single place. No, I don’t mean your inbox, such as Outlook or Outlook Express. This is even easier than that.

What I suggest requires creating multiple accounts with Google’s gmail. For those who may be worried, you are allowed to have multiple gmail accounts as long as your purpose for the accounts doesn’t violate Google’s TOS. Using your email accounts for ‘Contact Us’ purposes only is an acceptable use of multiple accounts.

I realize not everyone will want to use Google’s gmail. If you don’t want to do this then I’m afraid I’m leaving it up to you to figure out how to deal with the email address aspect of creating ‘Contact Us’ forms. I apologize but I simply don’t have the time to write instructions for every method available for doing this.

Now that you have created a primary email account and unique variations of this account for each niche store you need to periodically check your primary account for messages. When you log in you will see all your emails in one centralized place. But you won’t know which niche store your emails have come from just by looking at your inbox:

To figure out which store your email came from you need to click on an email to open it. Once you have done this you need to click the ‘show details‘ link:

Now you can see what email address the message was sent to, and this tells you what store the email is coming from and referring to:

That’s it. You now have a ‘Contact Us’ link that you can add to your site’s footer, a unique email address set up for each of your niche stores, and an easy way to read any messages you receive. Go ahead and click it to send yourself an email to verify that it works. Pretty nifty, eh?

Rochelle