Make a Contact Page on Your Site
If you want to email me at danifer.com, there’s only one page where you can find my email address. The reason for this is two-fold:
- By having a contact page, I can avoid putting my email address on every web page where I encourage customers to email me.
This is nice because if I have the need to change my email address, I can do it without much difficulty. It’s easier to change the address on one page than it would be to find every instance where I’ve used an email address and change them manually, and the extra step needed to get a hold of me is fairly inconsequential.
- I get a LOT of spam and the only effective way to control it is to regularly change my contact email.
I think contact forms are annoying, so I like to publish my address in the name@domain.com format so interested parties can email me using their method of choice. I find that when I’m faced with a contact form on a website rather than an email address, there’s about a one in five chance I’ll just decide it’s not that important that I get in touch with that person and I would hate if my customers felt the same way.
The problem with number two is that spammers are now using email scrapers that will visit websites looking for email addresses to add to their spam lists (that’s why you see people using email addresses and spelling them out like “name at domain.com”).
One way I’ve found to control the email scrapers is to publish my email address using javascript which most bots can not read. You’ll notice if you turn off javascript on your browser my address on the contact page will disappear. This is a little more complicated to implement, so it’s nice to have it on one page instead of dozens.