Small Business Websites

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In this day and age of technology, if someone is visiting your website, it’s so much easier for them to fire off an email to you than to pick up the phone and call. As a result, many sites have their email address listed and when the link is clicked, it opens a mail message. Yes, it’s super easy, but it can compromise your email address, making it available to thousands of spammers.

Oh, the spamming business has gotten smart and for years now, they’ve sent ’spam bots’ out over the internet to search web pages for email addresses. Because it’s a program, actual people don’t have to visit each of the millions of sites and gather emails, it’s all done automatically. This increases the chances that if your email is listed on your site, it will be found. Once found, your address is given to numerous different spamming companies or anyone willing to buy a list of emails from them. Now, you’ll be getting offers for Viagra, overseas partnerships, prescription drugs for cheap and a million other ‘opportunities’ or even complete nonsense emails. Once found, the only way to eliminate all the spam is to change your email address. This is tough to do as it’s the way people contact you. You wouldn’t change your business phone number one day and cutting off email is a major means of communication. If people can’t reach you, they can’t do business with you.

I’m sure you’ve seen more and more contact forms on websites and perhaps wondered why. The reason for this is that it hides your email address. People can still contact you and you’ll receive a message in your inbox, but the script that processes this action isn’t viewable by the spam bots and cannot be harvested, thus it’s safe. You can reply directly to the individual that emailed you and communicate that way.

Work-arounds like putting ‘click here‘ instead of showing your actual email address (name@mysite.com) make no difference. These bots are searching the code that your site is built from and behind the ‘click here’ words is code with your email. Many people try to fool the spam bots by writing something like ‘joe at my site dot com’. Unfortunately, as smart as we think we are, the spammers are always one step ahead of us. Think of all the ways you could disguise your email. Now, think of all the spammers out there who have already thought of this and found a way around it. It’s their job. They lie awake at night just coming up with new ways to torture us.

Aside from contact forms, some people put their email into an image (example on the left). This requires PhotoShop or something similar to create and is placed onto your website like a photo. Because there is no HTML code with your email address required to put this image up, your email is safe. However, you cannot add the option of people clicking on the image and an email box opening as this is adding your address into the code where it can be found. Additionally, any spammer visiting your site personally can add your address to their list, although the risk of this currently isn’t too high.

There are some businesses that want their email listed on their site and easily accessible or they may risk losing a sale. Real estate agents are often on this list. For many of them, it’s easier to deal with the spam than to lose a customer, so they just take the risks and deal with the consequences.

There is no right or wrong way to have people contact you, it’s simply a matter of what you’re willing to deal with. If you do use a contact form, keep it very simple with only what’s necessary. Making people fill in numerous blanks or check lots of boxes can scare them away. You can get the additional info you need after the first contact has been made.

Personally, I don’t want my email address on the web for any reason and I use a contact form. It’s also what I recommend to all my clients. So, if you’re building a site and thinking of listing your email, now you know the risks and can decide if it’s really something you want to do or not. If your email is already on your site, you may choose to remove it and offer another means of contact instead.

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