12 Web Notes

This is it. I just found an interesting discussion where a few people share their experience on how do they promote their blogs. While reading it, looks simple and easy but obviously take time. I am going to try these techniques that I read about, so I will highlight some items from the discussion and will leave a link to it for reference, just in case I (or you) would like to check it again.

Mat Huggins who attempts to make money online is the initiator of the discussion and has come up with brilliant idea on how to get reciprocal links with other business related blog authors and publishers. He offers a mutual blog review program. Although, this step alone has increased the number of his visitors, Mat is checking other resources too. A subscription in FeedBurner has developed a number of readers in very short time. Technorati looks like a must have subscription too.

Another forum member eborg9 suggested also MyBlogLog and joining some of the communities there. Eborg9 is running an entertainment blog and he say ” Along with everything else, the content is really driving more traffic my way. Post everyday. It works!”.

So far I started with MyBlogLog actually but I am going to find a few groups with similar interests there then the next items in my list will be FeedBurner and Technorati.

I am going to update this post every time when one of these items give results or if I find anything else that could help the blog promotion.

Many web owners and web developers and designers are concerned about the information published on the “Contact us” web page on their web sites. It is known that there are software applications used by spammers that automatically collect the e-mail addresses published on the web sites and use them afterwards for sending unwanted e-mail. These applications are commonly called “spam bots” or “bots”.
To prevent these bots from collecting their e-mail addresses, they use different tricks like:

• Masking the e-mail address – instead of name@domain.com it is published as name [ad] domain dot com;
• Publishing e-mail address as a picture – creating an image with the same background as the web site is and writing the e-mail address on it. Then put the image on the web site but do not link it to “mailto:name@domain.com”, instead just leave it so the visitor can read the e-mail address but have to type it in order to contact you;
• Using Java script to scramble the e-mail address and make it not readable for the spam bots, but readable for the visitors – this would not affect all bots;
• Do not publishing the e-mail address at all. Instead publishing a contact form that the visitors have to fill in to send you e-mail.

All the above methods aim to prevent from receiving spam e-mail, but how effective are they?
Let’s consider some additional information.
The spammers have many different ways for collecting e-mail addresses. Automatically reading the e-mail addresses from the web pages is one of the methods that bring them less result, so it is not their major source of collecting your e-mail address. Your e-mail address can be stolen from your partners, friends and customers computers if they have it written somewhere in the PC, in the address book for example. Similar source could be the mail server or contacts data base of an electronic bulletin that you are registered with. Hence, you do not publish your e-mail address on your web site but spammers got it from different place.
What about using contact form only, but not showing any e-mail address?
In my opinion this is one way to drive away big part of your visitors, who otherwise would contact you. Not showing any e-mail address as an option to be contacted is not good idea at all.

To place your e-mail address as an image on the web page or to write it masked like contact [ad] domain dot something and expect that the visitor will type it, in order to contact you is let say a half way “solution”.

In my opinion the e-mail address must be shown in its most convenient for the web site visitor way mailto:contact@domain.com. One click on it should allow either easy copy / paste function either shall open the visitors e-mail program. Personally, I like to see also the name and the position or speciality of the person which e-mail address is published and who I am gong to contact. Any other “trick” to hide the e-mail address from the spam bots make me think that the web owner is more concerned about not receiving 20 spam e-mail per day than receiving his/her customers e-mails (if it is some kind of business web site).

In other words, not showing your e-mail address on the web page is not the right way to fight spam. Instead, think about better service provider (if you are using hosting services) or implementing a good firewall, antivirus and e-mail system if you use your own machines.

The usage of contact forms

The contact forms can be a good additional method provided for contact but not the only method. They can be very useful for visitors who are not at their own computers and can not use their e-mail account in order to send you an e-mail. They could be used also by people who do not even have an e-mail address and want to leave you a message for contacting them by phone or by fax for example.

The best usage of the contact forms is when they provide some additional value like initially preset fields with subjects and various other information, which can help both the visitors and the web site owners. Eventually, the information collected by these contact forms could be send to a data base for further statistical analysis.

An interesting discussion about the usage of contact forms vs e-mail addresses can be read at Small Business Forum discussion board – Contact page