Contact form on home page.

[bronxpad]

I am looking to add a contact form onto my home page and I was wondering if it made sense to change my index.html to an index.php.

If i do make this change,  would it have any impact on my search rankings?

[StreamlineMetrics]

I'm a big fan of putting some kind of contact form or at least a call-to-action on every single page of your site, so great idea. Anyways, that's not your question, so if you need to switch to index.php in order for your form to work, then go ahead and do so. But make sure you 301 redirect index.html to index.php since search engines will consider them to be two different pages. I am assuming your site is hosted on a Linux server with access to .htaccess so you should be able to accomplish this by adding the following lines to the .htaccess -

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule index\.html index.php [NC,R]

[Prospector-Plastics]

Would it also help if Joel put a canonical on the new index.php page?

[NaescentAdam]

Depending on the platform and depending on the contact form you either dont need php, or you can just output html files with an SEO/SEF plugin.

Is it a basic site or one with a cms?

[Brian-H]

There would be no need as if a 301 redirect is in place the html no longer exists.

Canonical would only be used if the two pages were live side by side but you wanted to show one as the master content page.

[jasmin28]

I would not put a contact form on the homepage, maybe a link to the contact page.

[bronxpad]

It's a basic site.

[bronxpad]

you don't believe it increases the chance a person will fill in the contact page? I'm trying to increase my conversion rates.

[NaescentAdam]

If you don't mind doing a little coding you could try this simple contact form

http://css-tricks.com/nice-and-simple-contact-form/

There are other options out there for a full blown contact form from MailChimp et al, although many seem to be trying to get money for what is essentially a really basic thing.

Mail Chimp or Constant Contact is good if all you want is basic email capture, with Mail Chimp offering free services under 2000 subscribers, although it does include a mail chimp link or small logo.

If you Google "html contact form" you'll get lots of options. Personally I would go with Chris Coyier's option above and include his spam options.

If you dont need to change from html to php I would'nt do it. 301s are great but when I changed a site from html with a 301 it didnt pass all the link juice and there was a slight drop in traffic, plus it stop you needlessly complicating it.

If you need help in setting it up let me know