Often web sites have a contact or two that you can email concerns and/or problems to. An email link does not jump you to another page, but (in most browsers) brings up an email form pre-addressed to that person and with a return address from the user's computer already entered in the form. The link is very easy to make.
Steps to Success
Add Mailto: Links to your web page
Open your web page file and insert (exactly as written) the following HTML code:
<p><a href="jwhitehead@jdwwebdesign.com"> Julie</a><br/>
<a href="mailto:youremail@yourdomain.com"> Me</a></p>
You can do this by copying the text directly off the browser screen with the mouse and pasting it into your web page, or you can (carefully) type the lines into the file. The lines may be placed anywhere in the file after the <body> command and before the </body> command.
Now save the file and use your second browser window to open your web page. (You may have to do a reload/refresh to get the browser to see the modified file.) If things have been done properly, you should get something like the following as part of your homepage display:
If you click on these links, they should allow us to send email to the corresponding addresses.
That's pretty easy, huh? Now use these two mailto links as templates to customize your web page by adding some links for other people that you may want to email frequently. You can either change these two examples to other addresses, or you can just add more mailto links to these.
There are a couple of guidelines to follow when making email links.
- Please don't make an email link that people cannot tell is for email.
For instance, if the text For More Information is underlined, people expect to click on it and go to another page with more information. If that's what they expect, then don't make it an email link! Be clear. Type something like, "For more information, please send email to info@seaweed.net"
If there is a list of officers on a web page and each of their names is a link, such as Ryan Williams, visitors assume the link will take them to a page with more information about that person. So don't surprise the visitor by making the link pop up an email form instead of a page of information. - Don't create an email link without spelling out the address.
That is, don't do something like Email me!
Some people have browsers that cannot do email forms. If there is no address spelled out, a visitor cannot write to you.
Also, someone might want to write you later, like from their home or office computer. Or they might want to put your address in their address book. Or they might want to print the page. Obviously, if the email address is not typed on the page, the visitor cannot write it down or print it for later use.
TIP
Spammers love to search and find emails on the web. They will use little programs to seek out emails and store them for future spamming.
To avoid this, you could use something like Email Riddler.
Email Riddler is an online tool that encrypts and transform your email address into a series of numbers when displaying it, making it virtually impossible for spam harvesters to crawl and add your email to their list. output now XHTML valid