Hide Your Email Address From Spammers With Contact Forms

Every website should give visitors a way of contacting the person who runs it (that's you, right?). But if you place your email address anywhere on your site sooner or later it will fall into the hands of spammers and you will end up with a lot of unwanted email, and I mean a lot.

A simple solution is to use a contact form instead. Contact forms give visitors a way to contact you without revealing your email address. Though it won't stop unwanted email completely, it will prevent your email address from ending up on lists that are traded or sold to marketers who send junk email in bulk.

An actual contact form is easy to make with HTML form tags however to get it to work requires a script which is beyond the capabilities of HTML code. But not to worry, there are online form services that will make and process forms for you. You simply choose the elements you want to include on your form such as a message text box, and the code is automatically generated for you to copy and paste into your webpage. When someone uses the form to contact you, their message is sent to the email address you specified when you signed up for the service.

A free service I can personally recommend because I use it for my contact forms is www.emailmeform.com Of course there are others, both free and paid, do a search to find the one that's best for you and give your inbox a break from spam. If you would like to learn how to construct forms see the tutorial Tags For Making HTML Forms.

Free HTML Editor Software

When updating my website  I wanted to write code so that it would validate as being properly written in version HTML 5,  at least for the main webpage. In order to do that I needed to include this tag between the head tags of my HTML files:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

I wrote my HTML code in Notepad and by default Notepad encodes files, including HTML files, in ANSI instead of UTF-8. Notepad does have the option to save in UTF-8 encoding, but not the right kind. Don't ask me what all this stuff means because I haven't got a clue, all I know is that I needed to find a word processor which will save HTML files in the kind of UTF-8 encoding  that would make my webpage pass the test.

In my search I came across Notepad 2. It's completely free and is a simple but pretty handy  little HTML editor. By little I mean it's only around 300kb and can be kept and run off  a usb drive without any  installation needed, I just downloaded the zip file from www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html, unzipped it and launched the program by clicking on its icon ( I downloaded the 4.2.25 Program Files (x86) zipped version).

Some of its features:

• auto inserts closing tags (saves you some finger work)
• unlimited undo and redo (something that comes in handy for me)
• syntax highlighting to help you catch coding errors

Sorry Apple fans, Notepad 2 is only for Windows but I'm sure there's something similar for you Macheads too.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention, it encodes in the kind of UTF-8 I needed, which was why I was  searching for a new HTML editor in the first place. It's now become my main editor for writing HTML, but I still think plain old Notepad is pretty good, as long as you don't use <meta charset="UTF-8">

Screen Shots

 

Pointing Domain To Free Web Host

One of the cool things about the internet is that there's a lot of stuff you can get for free, including web hosting for your website.Here is how to set up a domain registered at Name Cheap to work with the free web host 50webs.com.

Go to 50webs.com and sign up for a free web hosting account. The sign up page will ask you to fill in your details, where it says Add a Domain Name to host select Use my existing domain and enter your domain url into the text box:

Once you have your web hosting account  login to your Name Cheap account to configure the dns settings. Oh relax it's going to be easy.

1. In your Name Cheap account click Your Domains/Products  in the upper right sidebar:

2. Next click on your web address:

3. Click Transfer DNS to webhost in the left side bar:

Please note that "transfer DNS to webhost" is NOT the same as transferring a domain, your domain will still be registered at Name Cheap.

4.Enter dns1.50webs.com and dns2.50webs.com into the text boxes and be sure "Specify custom DNS servers" is selected:

 Click the Save button and you are done! Told you it was easy. It will take anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours  for your domain to begin working with your site. So get to it, start uploading your site files while you wait and be sure the file name of the home webpage of your site is index.html otherwise your domain won't work.

Note
When using the dns of a web host some of the services  Name Cheap provides such as email forwarding and url forwarding will not be available. If  you would like to continue to have all the services of Name Cheap you can point your domain to your website using an ip address instead of  dns. Read how in  the post "Pointing Domain With Ip Address.