Put a Contact Link on Your Site Without Inviting Spammers to the Party

When I started teaching people how to make home pages, one of the things I taught them was how to put their email address online in a click-able link.

Sadly, things have changed a lot since those days, and today, I teach people NOT to put their email address online.

So, what do you do, if you would like people to be able to contact you, but you’re not interested in tons of spam mails?

The best way of going around putting an email address online is by setting up a form.

A form makes it possible for the guest to email you, even if the person doesn’t have an email client on the computer, he’s using.

And you can avoid spam, when you use a form.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have to use a scripting language like PHP to make the form work, or…

Great news!

Use this free site that offers you a link to your own spam-free form. I have not once, ever, never received spam through this form!

The steps are simple, and I’ll also show you how to in a short video.

1. Go to http://contactify.com/
2. Write your email address in the form as well as a password, you choose.
3. Click the button Create Link.
4. Now you’ve got a link, you can use, but in order to make the form better, you should make it visible that it’s your form. To do that, you must first login, so click on the link .login.
5. Type your ID and password, and login.
6. Click on .change display name, and write your name instead of the ID that formed your previous display name.

So, this is all good. Your form is ready, and when somebody uses it to write you a message, you’ll receive it in your inbox.

You just need to make this form available for the public, and you can do that in one of two ways.

If you only want a link to the form, you already got it, when you signed up. The link consists of http://www.contacify.com/xxx where xxx is your ID.

You can put this link online by entering the HTML code on your site and creating a link like this:

<a href=”http://www.contacify.com/xxx” target=”_blank”>Contact me</a>

Remember to use your actual link, and not the one I wrote with xxx. It will not work 😉

But if you want to show your guests a form instead of just a link, that’s possible too.

1. Back on Contactify, you logout, if you’re still logged in, and you go back to their home page.
2. To the left, you’ll see a cloud saying “embed contactify on your site!” – click on it, and type in your ID in the form that shows.
3. Click on the Widgetbox button…
4. And copy and paste the code you get into your site.

Happy communication 🙂

Later, much later: I had problems exporting the movies. For some reason there was a bug in on of the three clips, I made. So you can in fact edit the width of the form by going back to the Widget site and doing so. I had recorded all that, but … yeah, well, didn’t work out.