Publishing your email address says, “please, spam me!”
A regular topic in my sermons to startup is the importance of disclosure, of opening the doors to your business to allow customers to learn about who works there, what they do, and how your culture differs from that of your competitors. In an age when so few companies ever meet a customer face-to-face, it’s vital to offer some online disclosure as a substitute.
But too much of any good thing can hurt you, including disclosure. Encourage your employees to blog about their work, write about your plans for your company as soon as the whiteboard notes have been copied onto your laptop, but please… don’t put your email address on a web page.
Despite evil bots hovering out there waiting to scrape up every email address that is published on the interweb and add it to a spam database, people still put their email address on web pages everywhere. The need to be contactable outweighs the pain of more spam. But it needn’t be that way.
There are a number of ways to hide or encrypt your email address when it is published on a web page, but many of these methods can be decrypted to allow a spambot to snag it. So why put the email address on the page at all? Why not use a form and a database?
I’ll tell you why not: forms and databases are dry, unleavened developerbread – I fall asleep every time somewhere between “records” and “fields.” Life’s too short.
Wufoo.com has many superpowers, not the least being some of the zushiest dynamic interface you’ll find on the interweb, making it easy-peasy to design a web form and the database that sits behind it.
You can build something as simple as an email feedback form (so that your email address remains unpublished) or something as schmancy as a 15 minute online survey form. Good CSS support means you can customise a form so that it looks like part of your website, but if that’s all a bit too hard, use Wufoo’s pre-designed templates and copy-and-paste the code into your web page. Job done.
Here’s one I built earlier for my About Page. When someone fills in the form, the details are taken down in a database I can access at the Wufoo site, and then the database emails me the contact request.
Believe me: absolutely no programming required. Sure, I still get spam, but mostly from my parents… another story…
