This article was written by Mike Panic and is about: Blogging, Rant

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Over the last two months or so I’ve been putting more and more effort into blogging, mostly on this site and not so much on my other one, I enjoy writing and judging by the traffic, RSS subscriptions growing and articles making it to Digg, others enjoy this blog as well. In building this blog, I’ve met some great people, some have turned into staff here and others have become regular commenter’s here. I’ve in turn added their site to my iGoogle homepage so I can read and comment on their articles.

Occasionally, I want to connect with a blogger for any number of reasons,

• I want to show them something I’ve written here without it looking like comment spam
• They have great writing and I’d like to discuss having them guest blog here
• I’m interested in guest blogging on their site
• They have a great plugin for WordPress and I’d like a little more info about it

The list can go on and on, but the point is, I may have a desire to contact them. The problem is, more than half of the blogs I visit do not have a simple contact page, like the one here on Randomn3ss. If you are a blogger, please read on, I don’t care if you own your own domain or use a hosted blog, this is very important.

Have a dedicated contact page. On that page, you can do one of two things, use a contact form or an email address. I prefer to use a contact form, it keeps out the vast majority of spam and doesn’t require the reader to launch an email application or browse away from the site to open their web mail in a new tab or browser window. If you are using WordPress, my recommendation is this contact form plugin, I use it here and what it is what I have been installing for other clients and friends blogs. Super simple to install, easy to setup and you’ll have a professional looking contact form in a few short minutes. Other blogging platforms, I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer for you, I only use and know WordPress.

If for some reason you feel the need to give your email address out publicly, do not hard code it into your site, anywhere, ever. You will get more spam than you could ever hope to eat. Also, do not type your email address out and require your users to figure out how to get it to you, an example would be

Please send all emails to blablabla [at] website [dot] com and replace the [at] with @ and the [dot] with .

This is a huge disservice to your readers. Not only do they have something unpleasing to look at, they have to try to figure out what exactly your email is. There is a cleaner option, generating a graphic for your email, Sig Tools has a pretty decent one even if their site is mangled up with stupid ads. The result is this rather decent looking graphic,

They offer about a dozen different domain names, all color correct to what the actual email site looks like, border color options, ability to use a custom domain name and they’ll even let you hot-link the graphic. Personally, I’d download it and host it myself, it’s what I did for this post, but to each their own. If you have a need to show off your email address, this is a much cleaner option. Do not use the mailto: tag for this though, just put it on your page as a graphic. The reader will still need to remember it, go to their mail application or open a new browser tab / window and type it in, but at least it looks better and is less confusing then the previous method I discussed.

As bloggers / writers / journalists, we often focus all of our energy on writing content and coming up with clever headline titles that will draw in users, what we often overlook is what a user sees and how they navigate through a website. I often ask friends of mine to look at my site and tell me what they think of button and link placement to get feedback, I also use Google Analytics to check where visitors have been clicking, always tweaking and moving stuff around to better please the viewer. After all, we write so people will read, let us not make reading painful.

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