MarTech Hacks – Getting Your Opt-in Form to Work on a WordPress Website

If you have followed the advice from the article on generating your own opt-in form, then you may have taken a try at pasting the code into your WordPress website. Simple enough, just go into text mode, paste in the code and publish. Only one problem, the form is really messed up. The input boxes are too close together, the field names are all over the place, it’s just not right, not at all like forms you can get from a good WordPress forms plugin.

What went wrong?

Many ESP’s provide embedded styles with the forms they generate to make the form more or less stand-alone. Some of these ESP’s actually provide a set of style tools with the form builder so you can match your branded colors and look. The range of capabilities offered by various ISP’s is pretty wide (AWeber is a bit over the top in styling, SalesForce Web-to-Lead gives you no style marks at all, just the form code). Yet even heavily styled forms don’t look right on a WordPress page, and when you look at the form code with the text tab in WordPress, all of the style marks have been removed. That’s because WordPres has a default filter that takes out all but the simplest markeup, including the form style. To stop this from happening you can have a page template created which flips a flag that de-activates the filter, but there is a simpler way.

Here’s the MarTech Hack:

The Raw HTML Plugin is a simple plugin that provides a shortcode called RAW. To use it, you enclose your form code between a tag and a closing tag. WordPress will not auto-format the code between the raw tags.

Of course you may have other formatting problems, such as the form style not matching your site style at all. For that you made need a developer’s help, but at least you won’t be fighting the WordPress formatter.