If you run a blog – or for that matter, any website – you will probably want to know how many visitors it attracts. There is nothing conceited about this desire because setting up a site on the Web is, after all, an attempt to communicate with the world and it is natural to want to know how the world is responding.

A simple and popular way of counting visitors, and one that I started using myself (see my post Counter culture), is to install a “hit counter”. There are many of these available online, ranging in design from a plain number, through numbers beside visitors’ national flags to world maps showing visitors’ locations. Most of the simple ones are free while those that provide more extensive information may require a fee.

I soon realized that there are problems with the simple hit counter. The first, a practical issue, is that they count every hit on you blog, including a visitor refreshing the page. They also count all my visits, including those where I am viewing the blog to check on editing changes. All this leads to an inflated figure of supposed “visits”.

Then there is the question of what is meant by “a visit”. If the same person visits your blog several times during the day, do you count all these visits or only the first one? Some hit counters can be configured to record “unique visits”, that is, they count only a person’s first visit of the day and ignore all further visits until next day. Most of the simple hit counters do not offer this option.

The second problem is one that I alluded to in my previous post: to what use are the suppliers of free hit counters putting your blog? They have to make money somehow, so what, exactly, are they selling? At the very least, they will include a link in the counter so that anyone clicking on it will be shown advertising. What else might they be doing? Well, we don’t know really, do we? With these thoughts in mind, I deleted the hit counter.

I then took a look at the list of “widgets” supplied for use with the blog. There I discovered one called Blog Stats. WordPress collects very useful statistics about your blog and these are readily accessible to the blog owner. The widget Blog Stats copies one of the quantities from these statistics. So I put it in the sidebar and entitled it “Visitors”. Then I realized that the number that Blog Stats displays is not the number of visitors (unique or not) but the number of pages clicked on, referred to as “page views”.

A moment’s thought will make it obvious that that number of page views is not the same as the nunber of visitors. Any one visitor may click on several pages so the number of page views will be at least a large as the number of visitors but almost certainly much larger. So I renamed the widget in the sidebar to Page Views.

The annoying thing is that, though WordPress does keep a tally of the number of visitors (unique visits) from the start of the blog to the present moment and I can see it by looking at my statistics, there doesn’t seem to be any way to display this number in the sidebar. This is one reason why hit counters are so popular, I suppose.

“Page Views Culture” wouldn’t have the same punning ring as “Counter Culture”, and so this post has a rather tame title but it does at least pose the question that I hope the post answers.

When you visit a person’s or company’s website, it may be because you wish to contact that person or company, in which case you will look for a link labelled something like “contact details”. In my case, there is a link labelled “Contact me” in the sidebar.

I provide three ways you can contact me:

1. a link which should start your email client with my contact email address loaded in the “To” field;
2. an email address that you can copy and paste into your email client if method 1 does not work for you; and
3. a contact form.

Contact forms are very popular because their use avoids revealing the person’s or company’s email address to spammers and other potential abusers. (The email address I give is an alias which I can replace if spammers get hold of it.)

When I wrote my contact page, I wanted to add a form because many peope who have contacted me from my old blog did so via the contact form and it therefore seems a popular choice. However, since I first started blogging with WordPress, there have been many changes to the platform’s software and, search as I might, I could not find a contact form for this blog.

Well, I could find one, called Contact Form 7, but that comes as a plugin and you cannot use plugins with a free WordPress account – you have to upgrade to a paid account.

My next attempt was to look online to see whether I could find a free contact form that could be linked to the blog using simple HTML code (WordPress does not allow you to use scripting languages such as Javascript). There are such forms but their use seems very complicated and once you link to an external site, you are never sure quite what use they are making of your blog – click-through advertising might be the least of your worries.

So I had an idea: what if I were to copy whatever code I used for the contact form on my old blog and pasted it into this blog? Surely, it could not be that simple?

Well yes, it is just that simple. I copied the code and – voilà! – there was the contact form! I tested it and it worked!

Why did it work? I investigated further and discovered why I could create a contact form so easily and in a way that no one on all the websites I had visited seems ready to admit to. So, if you have a free WordPress.com blog and want a simple, no-hassle way to create a contact form, here is how you do it.

Start by looking at this website: https://en.support.wordpress.com/shortcodes/

There you will be introduced to the wonderful world of “shortcodes”. There are very many of these, for all kinds of purposes. The contact form is some way down the list but you will find it – look for “contact-form”.

How do you use it? Well. note that beside it is a link promising “Full instructions” and that should be all that you need. There are various options for the layout of the form and fields to enter. To see what a very simple one looks like, click on “Contact me” in this blog’s sidebar.