Every website needs to encourage the visitor to contact the company or otherwise take action. You want to make it easy on the visitor to contact you by whatever means they are most comfortable with. One of those methods is normally by email. However, this is a potential vulnerability for you and your site if your email addresses are visible on the site to visitors, as “harvesters” will collect them and you’ll over time get buried with spam.

The solution is to have “contact forms” which the visitor can fill out, that then automatically send you an email, like this: Thirteen05 Contact Form.

There are still issues of spam and hacker attacks. “Robots” – automated programs that scour the net for vulnerabilities – can bury you in hundreds if not thousands of emails, even so many as to crash your site.

There are two good ways of dealing with this issue. One is to have a field that must be a number (by dividing the phone number into area code, exchange and number fields, for example). Code can detect if a number is entered into the field or not and reject it if not. The robots aren’t always smart enough to recognize a field that must be a number, which makes this particular method quite effective when properly deployed.

The other method is to use a “CAPTCHA” – image with letters and numbers that robots can’t read, person has to fill in by hand.

Personally, we prefer the “required number” solution. Sometimes the CAPTCHA’s are just hard to read and people get annoyed and you miss contacts as a result.

This has become an increasingly important issue, and we are now going through all our client websites to install such protection.