I decided I want to add a contact form to Findability Today instead of just adding a mailto link with my email address. The reason I made this choice is three fold.
The first reason being that with no email address on the page there is a much smaller chance of getting random spam email from a bott that farmed my email address off the the site.
Now that more and more people are using web based email as there only email, a mailto link is not as practical. As the code is written, it cannot open up a browser and then launch the web mail site you use like it can with a desktop based mail application.
The last reason is with a form that is accessible, usable, and well thought out, the reader can narrow the question and just zip you off a quick note. That is part of what Findability is, giving the readers a well thought out way to complete a task on your site.
So I decided to add the page, and then I got to thinking. I could hand write the HTML / PHP to make the form work and come up with a safety to keep spam out of it, but this is WordPress and we have a community of developers that have written some great plug-ins. So, there must be one for this also.
And there was. After some short searching I came across a plugin on Beast-Blog.com . A great secure and accessible form plugin for WordPress written by Mike Cherim (http://green-beast.com/) and Mike Jolley (http://www.blue-anvil.com/) . If you can install a plug-in on your blog, then you can by all means do the install for this one.
A great install guide is on the site that walks you through the set up once you have uploaded the files to your server. You can even add custom CSS to it if you like. I started with the default style and it looked good in my template. If it does not look the way you want with yours, you can fix it by hand or there is a list of styles that come with it for a whole lot of popular WordPress themes.
So did I make the right choice to not include my email address on the site? Do you like a form or a mailto link? Drop me a coment and let me know what you think.
As always thanks for reading.
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You certainly don’t want to include your actual email address anywhere on your site. I use feedback forms with captcha (which I’m not wild about) on a couple of sites, and I’ve also just posted my address as myname at mysite dot com. For now at least both work fine for me. Other bloggers just leave comments open on the contact page and let WordPress and Akismet deal with spam.
It’s certainly an issue though.
I have tried the address as myname at mysite dot com on sites before and it works to keep the spam down but, I do not like the fact that I have to ask the reader to jump through a new hoop to send me a message.
Your thoughts? Should we worry about asking them to do that?